Again and again, I keep encountering time fetishes that correlate with political ones.
For example, traditional Marxists tended toward teleology, belief that civilization has an inevitable course, propelledtoward inevitable outcomes by class war and by ever-increasing industrial production. Though today's 'leftists' wouldn't know anything about that - I have yet to meet one - even one - who could describe old Karl's historical patterns or future extrapolations. Or what he actually said about capitalism. Nor, indeed, do they ever put any of today's passions in a context of 6000 years. (A very badly needed context!)
On the other hand, they are positive geniuses compared to today's Mad Right. And I mean all of it, from the world oligarchy of casino mafiosi, hedge squires, oil sheiks, Kremlin "ex"-commissars, techie preppers, mandarins and inheritance brats, all the way down to your frenzied MAGA uncle, who dreams that wreaking McVeigh-ngeance on nerds will somehow make him superior to all those smartypants 'fact' users. Nearly all members of that reactionary cult wallow in the same macro-delusion...
...cyclical history. WIthout actually knowing anything about those 6000+ years, they cling to fantasies that "We've all been here before. And this phase will bring my decadent foes crashing down, just like..."
... just like, what? Well, there's the rub.
== Let's get into those patterns and 'cycles' ==
While there is zero evidence for 'cycles,' history does show some basic 'attractor states'... above all a tendency for human males to do many of the same tiresome things that almost ALL other males do, in nature...
... which is take advantage of any opportunity to monopolize reproductive success at the expense of other males. (Pick almost any animal type; that is the most visible and garish intra-species struggle, though taking a wide variety of competitive modes, from violence to 'gaudy plumage.')
In humans, this Darwinian tendency manifested - with the arrival of agriculture and towns - in 8000 years of varied forms of feudalism, wherein gangs of bullies smashed all potential competitors, while taking other men's women and wheat. (8000 years ago especially, there was a huge event, a 'Y-chromosome bottleneck when - as told by DNA - for a few centuries only about 15% of male humans reproduced! Look it up.)
A strong argument can be made that feudalism - in the varied types that dominated 99% of those 80 centuries - is the most 'natural' human governance mode. Certainly every generation features SOBs trying hard to re-impose it! (Including each phase of the U.S. Civil War; we're now in phase #8.)
Alas, while it may be the 'natural attractor state' - (we're all descended from those cruel harems, folks) - it's also true that feudalism has proved always to be crappy at governance!
Look at that awful litany of horrors called... history! Even good kings - and there were some! - barely budged the needle, seldom encouraged real progress, and almost always left things to idiot sons or grandsons to f___ up. This happened - always - because autocratic rule suppresses the one thing that allows discovery and correction of leader delusions and errors...
That one thing was - and remains - reciprocally accountable criticism. The ability of critics to point out leadership errors, before they become lethal, and then argue out alternative, based on facts.
That trait - suppression of error-discovery criticism -is why almost all feudal regimes governed terribly! Leading to that litany of horrors called history.
== Is there a way out? ==
Humans did find an alternative to this trap! A rare one! Indeed, one that was perhaps so unlikely that we may be the only ones in the galaxy to stumble into it! (One of my top five theories for the Fermi Paradox!)
That alternative mode of governance - the Enlightenment Experiment - is very good at fostering corrective, fact-using criticism! And it works. Flattened societies that allow free-fair-open competition always do better - by orders of magnitude - discovering errors and exploiting opportunities.
These 'enlightenment' departures from kingship/lordship were starkly rare! One experiment in ancient times - Periclean Athens - stunned all the surrounding kingdoms and oligarchies... till those surrounding, macho-lordly realms swarmed in to crush it.
- Renaissance Florence fell the same way, after its burst of glory drew savage response from terrified autarchies.
- Amsterdam barely survived the same feudal attacks... but endured to spread seeds leading to 3 centuries of spectacular successes!
Success that oligarchies have since tried to destroy every generation, including a major attempted putsch as we speak.
== Qualifying my praise of Enlightenment Society ==
But still, for honesty's sake: let me stipulate two flaws to the prodigiously more fair, scientific, progressive, creative, free and fun enlightenment approach - flaws that we have yet to solve:
1. The criticism habit can metastasize! It can become cancerous to society - as it did in post Periclean Athens - when sanctimony becomes a drug abused by all sides, robbing criticism of its corrective value, devolving it into rituals of hate.
2. Much of that enlightenment progress - correcting countless past injustices, for example - came at an incremental pace we now view as appallingly, horrifically slow!
Though far faster than any other, recalcitrant human society.
== Can we get back to those cycles of history? ==
Why did I just go into that? Because all of it is ignored by the simplistic political cults out there... 'Marxists' who know nothing about Marx... the non-Marxist left, who believe their (mostly laudable!) liberal reformist demands somehow erupted from their own brows, instead of from hard increments, won by ten preceding generations...
...and especially today's flaming-rightists whose uber-favorite book, nowadays, is called The Fourth Turning, by Strauss & Howe -- an exercise in mesmerizing pareidolia that's especially alluring for folks on that side of the aisle.
And yes, 4T is a pile of historical/teleological nonsense, utter hogwqash that caters - like porn - to the desperate need of conservatives for 'cycles'. (Confederates, Nazis, you name the fascist cult; they all throw themselves at cycle-fetishism in one form or another.)
It's always lurked there on the right. But The Fourth Turning cult is part of a final phase, toxic frenzy. It has so many former Goldwater conservatives - now fervent or uncomfortable Trumpists - salivating for a coming Grand Crisis. Worse, many are eagerly helping to bring one about!
Carumba, I don't have time to describe this quasi-religious tract that uses Bible-style incantations plus pseudo-sci mumbo jumbo to cram American history - somehow in isolation from the world(!) - into a perfect 80 year pattern of four generational personalities: each cycle or 'turning' concluding with an admirable 'hero generation' of the US Revolution, the Civil War, WWII...
...and now the millennials + Gen-Z'ers are gonna have to step up to fulfill that ordained heroic role!
I know more history than most folks - (it's typical of sci fi authors, actually) - and I fail to see any correlation between The Fourth Turning (4T) BS and any aspect of American life! Howe's fabulations are based upon stories about vast and varied, borderless populations of individuals, stereotyping them as monotone 'generations.' Even the Boomers - who might be said to have some recognizable 'generational' demographics - overlap with these traits of Howe's only if you squint hard, after pouring lemon juice in your eyes.
Take young people, in their twenties. The ones I've met certainly do seem generally nicer than most boomers were, I'll avow. Much less sex-frantic and more diversity comfortable...
...but so now are half of those same boomers! Half of the Boomers you know, in fact, are nicer than they used to be! Those millions laid the groundwork for every 'heroic' thing the the 4T cultists expect from my poor kids. So... maybe we grew up a bit together?
== Okay, let me conclude by giving into grouchy temptation! ==
In fact, if I may be indulged a brief, old-fart-grumble? The one trait that I see -- pan-spectrum -- among young people -- a quality that does seem somewhat 'generational' -- is a wee bit of a cult belief in fragility. That mere words might wound someone so deeply that there's no recovery, no walking it off, no chance of toughing out the 'verbal trauma' and moving on.
Hey, this trend is rooted in a good impulse! Because it can happen! People are vulnerable and resilient across a vast range. I'd say 10% of folks were never able to 'tough it out and move on' after mere verbal triggers - not in olden times and not now. We should change our ways, every year, to be more kind!
We should move toward a diversity that includes allowances that some folks don't benefit from 'walking it off'!
But a majority? Of... the toughest species the world ever saw?
No, no, girls and boys and others. That person you see in the mirror is likely a whole LOT more resilient than this generational fragility-incantation encourages you to believe! (And yes, and it correlates with video-playing physical passivity.)
Kids, you are descended from all those heroes of history who had things far worse than you do. Every generation overflowed with 'heroes' who picked themselves up, brushed themselves off and then strove to make the world better.
Not perfect! But better-enough for you to now improve it, further-still!
Especially if... according to all that Fourth Turning cycles blather... YOU are gonna have to be the scheduled Hero Generation!
If that is your destiny - because idiots deliberately incite a 'crisis' to fit their cult incantations - then sure. You be heroes!
I know you've got it in you.
So do I.
199 comments:
Any typos to fix?
So you aren't a fan of Asimov's "Foundation"?
In a corollary to my 'science may actually have assisted zero-sum thinking' thought, it's possible that the great Santayana's 'condemned to repeat it' line encourages the cyclical history fallacy. This is why dime-store philosophy is so destructive. Alas, this is the age of the sound bite.
Y.N. Harari says that history is not the study of the past, it's the study of change. History is not about remembering the past, it's about liberating ourselves from it, and that we shouldn't be trapped inside the dreams of dead people.
So how do you feel about Toynbee's "A Study of History"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History
As meta histories go, this one's not bad and seems to be reasonably accurate in broad brush strokes.
According to Toynbee there are only four remaining "civilizations": Western, Islamic, far Eastern and Hindu. Each existing and extinct civ goes through a predictable cycle of growth and decay:
Challenge and Response- causing the birth of a civilization. For the West that would be the “stimulus of new ground” caused by barbarian volkwanderung at the end of Hellenic Civilization (fall of the Roman Empire).
Cultural growth – led by a creative minority that spurs a civilization to greater heights of artistic, scientific, cultural, economic and political advancement. The majority willing emulates this creative minority. For the West, this stage stared in the so-called Dark Ages and really gathered steam during the Renaissance, Age of Exploration and birth of Science.
A Time of Troubles – when war and the struggle for power leads to destruction of cultural creativity as the leading minority stops being creative and becomes a dominant minority which forces the majority to obey without meriting obedience. The West has seen a time of troubles since the Napoleonic Wars through the World Wars and the Cold War. We can see the continued mutation of the new dominant minority as the uber rich establish an oligarchy which controls the economy and the political process.
Creation of a Universal State – as one competitor (like Rome) achieves total dominance and defeats all rivals to create an empire encompassing its civilization. In the West that is obviously the United States.
Cultural decay – the establishment of a Universal State creates an alienated internal proletariat resentful of being under the thumb of the dominant minority and an external proletariat of barbarians. Such hordes would have to be created by catastrophic climate changes turning those now living within the borders of the American empire into hordes of refugees (which was what many of the barbarians migrating into the Roman empire were). The refugees from Syria entering Europe to escape ISIS and war, which was caused by a prolonged drought, which in turn was caused by climate change may be the first of many.
(YOU ARE HERE)
A Universal Church – created by the alienated internal proletariat as an outlet for its dissatisfaction with its political and economic lot under the dominant minority. It’s no accident that Christianity spread through the Roman Empire via slaves, the poor, women and other oppressed minorities and disenfranchised.
Fall of the Universal State – As Toynbee noted, a universal state empire is not a golden age so much as an Indian Summer, a brief rally in an inevitable downward spiral. As the empire finally unravels politically, militarily and economically the external proletariat launches another volkwanderung and the internal proletariat creates a Universal Church which then forms the chrysalis of the next civilization.
Dr. Brin
A hearty Thanx! I've always considered the "pendulum swing" or cyclical theory of politics to be ridiculous.
The founders did something different. They succeeded in building a minimal government that lasted until the "progressive" movement started undoing it. Woodrow Wilson was the first president that attacked the Constitution. His "Executive State" was an explicit rejection of limited government.
By 1950, Lionel Trilling could write this (remember that the meaning of liberalism had changed by 1940 or so to mean statism):
"In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas. ( http://www.conservapedia.com/Lionel_Trilling )"
The truly remarkable thing about Mr. Trilling’s statement was that it was not exceptional. It wasn’t crazy, terribly extreme or anything, it was simply the accepted wisdom of the day. That was before conservatives/libertarians knew that they actually had to defend the ideas of the founders.
mcsandberg, "Defend the ideas of the founders"? The relationship with some evangelical religion suggests otherwise. The perils of mixing politics and religion were very much in the founders minds.
DP Toynbee later recanted much of that pareidolia. While it seemed neat, at first sight, it collapsed under scrutiny.
I faithfully finished Asimov's universe for him. That doesn't mean I deem the scenarios likely.
Dr. Brin,
Did a once-through. Pretty clean copy. I'll reread it tomorrow, but it looks good - none of your trademark errors (everyone, myself included, has them).
I mean, I shared an office area in Saudi with a young intel officer who swore angrily that "covert" meant out in the open, and "overt" meant hidden. I mentally generated an SEP field around them and went back to the weather room.
"Cycles of History" are very appealing to college sophomores - ask me how I know - because they simplify. Misleadingly. The Roman Empire had at least two, maybe three periods of "decay and regeneration". Why didn't it fall the first or second time? The cycles don't say. Might just as well blame the Mandate of Heaven.
Mary Beard's history, though, makes clear what gave Rome lasting dominance of the Med:
The ability to incorporate your enemies as near equals under your law.
Without that, an empire founded on conquest will fail just from manpower issues. A lot of people whine about 'recruiting Germans' as a cause of the fall, but it was corrupt officials' betrayal and mistreatment of possible allies that turned the 'tide of history' at Adrianople.
Which is I guess a lesson for any would-be post-apocalypse planners. Or add to the Evil Overlord list via Machiavelli - "I will not mistreat armed refugees who will be needed to protect my expanding empire*."
*Caveat - Expanding Roman territory beyond that which could be easily reinforced from the Med. Sea turned out to be a way to lose whole armies - the equivalent of 'never get involved in a land war in Asia."
Pappenheimer
McS,
The true "minimal government" the founders established were the Articles of Confederation, which then had to be superseded by a functional government. The Civil War gave the US a huge boost towards a centralized and powerful federal government superseding states' rights and individual rights - the right to not be drafted, for example. Do you think that was also unwarranted? Not an attack here - I'm honestly wondering where you would draw the line.
Pappenheimer
Larry,
..."Chicagoland" meant the six-county area surrounding the city proper...
Only six? Heh.
I actually know some of the names you mentioned, but probably couldn't place them with any accuracy around Chicago. I have a hard enough time doing it with the much larger Los Angeles region and I live only one county over.
When I went to grad school it was in a small town called Davis just west of Sacramento. The interstate connecting us to Sacramento and the 'Bay Area' was filling up as the other small towns built up and out due to people leaving bay cities to places where they could afford to buy anything*. I expected the entire I-80 (a highway you should know) corridor from Bays to Foothills to fill up some day. It sorta has, but I neglected to exclude the interior delta islands where it really doesn't make a lot of sense to build suburbs. They'd flood if the levees break. Some still filled in, but good sense prevailed in a few other places.
--------------
My history teachers taught me that Chicago is where it is because of the giant lake nearby that enabled cheap transport to the US east coast. Rail went to Chicago from the interior because... Chicago was there providing cheap water transportation. Roads went to Chicago (like I-80) because rail did and the early interstates were essentially Eisenhower's military transportation projects.
Basically... Chicago was a 'Winner takes all' result of earlier transportation decisions. Winning the earliest contest enabled easier wins for later ones. We have similar cities here in California, but they clump into two giant population centers... and one has a direct road to Chicago!
_____
* Generally at prices way above what the locals were expecting to pay, so one group moved in and another moved further out. This created what essentially became a political diaspora for California Republicans.
Only “propelledtoward” in the first sentence.
Btw, I met this guy twice, he has some real anger-management issues:
https://townhall.com/columnists/dineshdsouza/2021/11/24/the-new-confederacy-n2599649
Alfred Differ:
I-80 (a highway you should know)
Sure do. My brother lives in central Pennsylvania, and my directions to his town are essentially "get onto I-80 and continue east for about twelve hours". What an age we live in*
My history teachers taught me that Chicago is where it is because of the giant lake nearby that enabled cheap transport to the US east coast.
That's a big part of it. The other part is that only a small land crossing was necessary to connect Lake Michigan (and therefore all of the Great Lakes) to the Des Plaines River, which in turn flows to the Mississippi. Chicago was a transportation hub which connected trade routes to both the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.
* I distinctly remember a story we read in fourth grade about the trials and tribulations of a colonial-era family moving from Philadelphia "out west" in a covered wagon. I was surprised when I noticed that their destination was "western Pennsylvania". At the time, I was just learning about cities via their baseball teams, so I knew where Philadelphia was, and I was amazed to learn how distant in human terms the western part of the same state must have been at the time.
Relative to the conversation above, history is not just about learning what happened before or learning how to change it. History is also about stories because those help us to understand situations which took place in times and places significantly different from the one we occupy now.
Pappenheimer
The Articles of Confederation didn't even have taxing authority, which led quite quickly to the phrase "Not worth a Continental". That recent experience with a fiat currency caused the founders to put a gold and silver currency into the Constitution.
I wouldn't so much draw a line as undo recent mistakes. The first of those was a grotesque misreading of the 14th amendment to allow birthright citizenship.
The 16th and 17th amendments were the worst mistakes. The 17th, in particular, completely changed the character of the Senate and basically destroyed what the founders had built. The Senate was meant to be a body of ambassadors from the States that would exert a major check on the federal government because they were tasked with preventing it from trampling on the States.
Although Calvin Coolidge didn't take advantage of the 16th and 17th amendments, they enabled the creation of the federal leviathan we have now. This chart https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1792_2028USp_23s2li011lcny_F0f shows the result. Until WW I the federal government had consumed about 3% of GDP. After WW I the government did not shrink back down the that size.
Then there is Woodrow Willson's "Adminiistrative State". When the commerce clause can be stretched so fat that it allows:
• The EPA to set fuel milage standards - the CAFE rules
• The EPA to decide which fuels are allowed to be used to generate electricity.
• The EPA to require bathroom fixtures to use no more than an arbitrary 2.5 GPM (yes, Dr. Brin, I'm talking about plumbing, its one of the best examples of insane federal government overreach!)
• and so on
then you no longer have a Constitution.
Pappenheimer
Oops, didn't answer your question about the draft. Let me invoke one of my sayings:
Absolutes lead to absurdities. Absolute freedom, AKA Anarchy, leads to a totalitarian government.
If you're Israel, you have to have a permanent draft to survive.
If you're the United States, then the draft could be done like a declaration of war is - by an act of Congress and lasting for a limited time.
Larry Hart: History is also about stories
That is what Harari is constantly on about. While I do enjoy his thinking, I'm not a fanboy. He has a simplistic, 'headliney' view of computation and A.I. - unlike OGH, and even Asimov before tragedy struck him down.
mcsandburg:
a grotesque misreading of the 14th amendment to allow birthright citizenship.
Ok, I'll bite. What is being misread in the text:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside
You might think the amendment should have been worded differently, but that's a different thing (in fact the opposite thing) from a "misreading". If anything, your complaint seems to be that birthright citizenship takes the text too literally.
I'm curious as to who exactly you're trying to exclude. Surely, children born of immigrants meet the textual criteria, whether or not the parents have been fully naturalized. If you're trying to exclude children of illegal aliens, then you might be on firmer ground, but still, are you asserting that illegal aliens are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States? Because they sure don't seem to have anything like diplomatic immunity.
Remember also that the intent of the amendment was to assert that former slaves were citizens, despite the fact that when they or their parents and grandparents were born, they were not even considered human beings. The wording had to be broad enough to survive legal haggling over who counted. That might have lead to weakness or lack of foresight in the drafting itself, but again that is not a misreading.
* * *
I could make a case that Donald Trump is (apparently) not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and therefore not a citizen. And incidentally, therefore not eligible for the presidency.
Larry Hart
I'll quote from someone who has studied the issue in more depth than I have:
"The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of “birthright” citizenship.
Critics erroneously believe that anyone present in the United States has “subjected” himself “to the jurisdiction” of the United States, which would extend citizenship to the children of tourists, diplomats, and illegal aliens alike.
But that is not what that qualifying phrase means. Its original meaning refers to the political allegiance of an individual and the jurisdiction that a foreign government has over that individual.
The fact that a tourist or illegal alien is subject to our laws and our courts if they violate our laws does not place them within the political “jurisdiction” of the United States as that phrase was defined by the framers of the 14th Amendment.
This amendment’s language was derived from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided that “[a]ll persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power” would be considered citizens. [ https://www.heritage.org/immigration/commentary/birthright-citizenship-fundamental-misunderstanding-the-14th-amendment ]"
Yet another example of The Historian's Fallacy doing real damage.
scidata:
and even Asimov before tragedy struck him down.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr: "Isaac is in heaven now."
mcsandburg:
It says that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens.
...
This amendment’s language was derived from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided that “[a]ll persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power” would be considered citizens.
It doesn't say anyone born or naturalized in the United States whose parents are subject to the jurisdiction thereof. The baby has no allegiance to any foreign power.
@mcsandburg,
I'm curious how your interpretation would handle someone like Jamal Khashoggi. He was a perfectly legal permanent resident of the United States, but he was still technically subject to the foreign government of Saudi Arabia. Indeed, that is why he had to visit a Saudi embassy, leading to his torture and death. Had he instead survived to reproduce, would his child--presumably born in Virginia where he resided--not be considered a US citizen?
Larry Hart
That's why I referenced The Historian's Fallacy. Today's meaning of the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is not what it meant when the amendment was written. If they had thought that it meant birthright citizenship, the amendment would not have passed.
The meaning back then was that you and your family remained subjects of another country until you became citizens of the US. So Jamal Khashoggi, being a legal permanent resident would still be subject to the jurisdiction of Saudi Arabia and his child would also would be.
Hmmmm,
I'm not at all sure that families are naturalized as a unit. IIRC, a wife could be eligible for citizenship through her husband, but only if they specifically went through the process. It was not automatic, and it certainly isn't now. So "the parents" might not have the same status as each other relative to a foreign power.
Whatever was the case in the 1870s, relying on parentage for citizenship seems unworkable today. How would I demonstrate my citizenship if a birth certificate doesn't suffice? I could trace back through my parents, but how do I prove they were citizens? Turtles all the way down?
What if someone's ancestor walked across the Canadian border back in the days when it was easier to do such things? Would all of his descendants generations later fail the citizenship requirement because great-great-great-great-grandpa wasn't naturalized, even though everyone thought he was?
Birthright citizenship just makes things workable. As opposed to old European and Asian countries, US citizenship is about the individual, not about who his ancestors were.
In New York, you can be a new man.
Larry,
re: McS and birthright citizenship
This is the kind of thinking I ran across when someone argued the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free any slaves, and pointed out that there were more legally emancipated slaves in the South because those freedmen and freedwomen had emancipation papers granted by states like VA and FL.
Ignoring the masses of newly freed slaves courtesy of Bill Butler's 'contraband' policy (expanded across the jurisdiction of the Federal Army), which derived from the Emancipation Proclamation, because those freedfolk usually got no papers.
McS is arguing that a baby has a positive requirement to prove they aren't subject to any other nations' jurisdiction, where the common interpretation is that they only have a negative requirement to prove they weren't born anywhere else. Not surprisingly, this is being pushed by the Heritage Foundation, if that URL is any judge. (I did not pursue, not getting out of the boat on a Sunday morning.)
The US was founded with Rome as a model (but took a lot of legal precepts from England.) Originally Roman citizenship was famously based on the precept of 'show up and you're in' - it took escaped slaves and fleeing criminals from other cities, and grew accordingly. It also had a reputation for internal violence and aggressive foreign policy. Sounds somewhat familiar?
Pappenheimer
Larry Hart
No Western European country has unconditional birthright citizenship. England doesn’t either. Almost every country that does is in the Americas, mostly as leftovers from the colonial era https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-birthright-citizenship .
mcsandberg:
<>
I don't know that, and I doubt you do either. My telepathic powers barely work for people in front of me right now; for people distant in time and space, they don't work at all. Written text does help indicate inner intent, but not by much.
Oof. This site's telepathic powers don't work either. The dropped text was: 'the amendment would not have passed'.
Not surprising that Australia also has birthright citizenship...again, congruent with founding principles.
Pappenheimer
I think you may mean apophenia where you used pareidolia. Pareidolia generally refers to imagined visual objects or patterns. Apophenia is a more general category of believing in connections which are not there.
mcsandberg:
Almost every country that does is in the Americas,
Which makes sense, because most countries on the American continents were populated by people who came here, not by people whose tribe had ties to the soil. The names of most older European and Asian nations reflect ancestral ownership--"someone"-land or "someone"-ania or "someone"-istan. American-continental nations weren't founded that way.
Dave Sim, in his Cerebus comic, put it succinctly, albeit cynically, when his Weishaupt character described his vision for the "United Feldwar States". Rather than an ancestral homeland for a particular tribe, his new country would be dedicated to "making us all filthy rich.
Larry,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, etc were all heading for a kind of independence as lands stolen from their original owners. The name distinction you want to make doesn’t quite work for me, but the rest of your point does. We are now a nation of people who came here… and over ran the people who were here.
McSandburg,
If advocacy for that kind of change to the 14th picks up I’ll have to take up arms in the next hot phase of our civil war.
I can’t begin to express how much I dislike that narrower interpretation.
If you want to see resilience read the life story of the journalist George Monbiot!
Just an observation from the outside world. There's little consistency from those interpreting the US Constitution. Wild extrapolation regarding technology as with the 2nd. Yet the strictest possible literal interpretation regarding definitions like 'official' and 'citizen' as with later amendments. At times a living document, at times an immutable scripture.
Plus, the refs are unfair to the Blue Jays and Maple Leafs.
mcsandberg
"No Western European country has unconditional birthright citizenship."
What do you mean by "unconditional" here? Because Germany does in fact have birthright citizenship. I know I live in Germany and my children were born here. But the children have to choose at some stage because Germany only accepts dual citizenship sometimes (my children both have German and Australian citizenship because they have one German and one Australian parent - but for instance somebody who was born in Germany to Turkish parents has to choose either Turkish or German citizenship as a young adult.
Alfred Differ:
If advocacy for that kind of change to the 14th picks up...
Whatever was meant in the past, I don't see how the genie could be put back in the bottle now. We'd have tens of millions of citizens, myself included, with no way to demonstrate proof of citizenship. And more such babies on the way.
The name distinction you want to make doesn’t quite work for me...
My point wasn't so much about the names per se as to what they signified. "Land of the Francs". "Land of the Scots". "Land of the Afghanis". Whether one belonged in those countries depended on lineage. On this continent, we started something different, and I cringe when right-wingers who were once so proud of how different we were from the old world now insist that we emulate it.
...and over ran the people who were here.
I understand the moral stain concerning the disposition of the original inhabitants. However, that's irrelevant to this particular point.
It seems to me mcsandberg that only diplomats (and Donald Trump's intepretation of the President) and not subject to the laws of the land. And only the US regards non-residents as being subject to it's laws.
Alfred, Chicago grew into a disaster because there was no drainage other than back into the lake. They had to fine a crop of hard stone and blast-excavate a giant cavity to take storm water, that can then be pumped away and treated, between storms.
Geez MCS we disagree at all levels. The world and humanity needed an American leviathan and pax in order to finally end 6000 years of brutally reflexive war and give commerce a chance to uplift and educate billions. Your use of rightist buzz phrases doesn’t hide the fact that we are by far more free and prosperous that even the WWII generation could have imagined.
As for DE-regulation of over-reaches of power? Tell me which party has torn away administrative units that betrayed their goals or became stiflers of freedom and commerce? Ever hear of the Interstate Commerce Commission? Ayn Rand made it her bete noir in SHRUGGED. The Civil Aeronautics board did similar market warping for airline. Both wiped out by Democrats who broke up AT&T too and are now too-slowly ending the damned DRUG WAR… which truly was a travesty abuse of state power.
SHOW me the deregulation (pro open competition) done by the GOP, please?
Back to the big picture… The American Pax/empire gave the world peace & development and – above all – set the stage for Hollywood to spread the values YOU espouse. Values like “Leave me alone, if you can’t show a really important reason to bother me!”
“and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens.”
Jesus seriously? That phrase was meant to exclude Indians who maintained separate national rights. CCarumba, man.
scidata,
Plus, the refs are unfair to the Blue Jays and Maple Leafs.
Ha! We* should've annexed you all shortly after our war with Mexico and had done with all this. We might have been able to get Alaska even cheaper. 8)
Seriously, though, you are right about consistency issues regarding interpretation approaches. We all do that to rationalize our particular POV, but that's not really a problem until we start forcing one upon another. Occasionally our SCOTUS has to get involved, but even they screw up and have to be re-interpreted by a later Court or by The People when we move on from how our Founders and Framers imagined things would be. Many Framers assumed we would, so an immutable scripture interpretation is actually a violation no matter who is doing it.
* Part of the joke in this is my ancestors (father's father) didn't come over here until '28. On my mother's side… she got here in '61. US/Canada relations had evolved long before I should be using the 'we' pronoun.
—————
Larry,
Whether one belonged in those countries depended on lineage.
Yah. I get it. I think that is the distinction anthropologists make between a 'nation' and a 'state/country'. The fans of geopolitics certainly make that distinction. For example, Thailand as it exists today is a state of three nations. Modern Russia is a state with many contained and partially contained nations. The US is definitely a country, but it's hard to define the tribal identities within it (except the natives) because we are an aggregate of waves of immigration.
I understand the moral stain…
I didn't mean to take the conversation there because I agree with it being irrelevant here. The reason I brought it up is that the 'over run' effect has occurred several times as various Old World diasporas caused people to wash up on our eastern coast. From the British Isles alone there were at least three waves long before the 1776 revolution. Thank goodness the Quakers tolerated (better) the arrival of the Scots-Irish (borderland people) because it was that wave that really started to populate the back woods.
…no way to demonstrate proof of citizenship…
They'd have to do something stupid like getting people to wear a token analogous of the Star of David. Different tokens for different immigration waves. Blood would pour in the streets if they tried.
—————
David,
…no drainage other than back into the lake…
Heh. Big City problems.
Los Angeles had to steal water from essentially everyone they could touch.
London had to re-plumb their entire sewage system to prevent the Thames from killing them.
It's a major engineering marvel that our big cities exist at all. Gives me optimism for space colonization. 8)
RE Y-chromosome bottleneck,
8000 years ago, who is to say the women were not in charge and just having a go at stud breeding? Maybe something along the lines of a Harlan Ellison story?
Alfred,
Re: civil engineering
Rome - have you seen pictures of the old boat tour through the Cloaca Maxima? Impressive work.
Reason, re: birthright...
I had to decide at age 18 whether to take US or Singaporean citizenship, because I was born in Glen Eagles Hospital, 6A Napier* Rd, Singapore 258500. Both of my parents are American.
*Now there's a name to conjure with. He was said to be responsible for the finest English words ever spoken in India:
"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
I won't try to defend most of the English record in India, but that one's OK.
Pappenheimer
It's quite entertaining to hear someone who believes in Human Progress and Pax Americana's Manifest 'World Police' Destiny dismiss teleology (aka 'the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise') as an absurdity.
What, What? Is it now our host's contention that the Enlightenment, Fairness, Diversity, Self-Improvement, Evolution, Uplift & Space Travel serve no more enduring purpose beyond pointless vanity?? Because, if this is the case, it sounds an awful lot like the original version of Ecclesiastes before Zelazny improved upon it.
Dr. Brin's objection to the cyclic history model also appears to be mostly semantics, being easily remedied by relabeling the objectionably named 'cycles' as a 'reasonable responses to prior injudicious over-corrections', making it more likely for history to reiterate rather than cycle & repeat.
It's a given that the US and EU Constitutions cannot protect you, me or anyone from the reasonable responses to prior injudicious over-corrections that are coming in our immediate future, as you & your progressive ilk have already bastardized said constitutions by attempting to delete the protections for which you disapprove (as in the case of the 1st & 2nd Amendments) and to add additional protections that you now prefer (as in the case of Abortion & Civil Rights), so it will be no great stretch to alter both the EU & US Constitutions going forward in ANY WAY that we may choose, including & especially the complete elimination of the 14th Amendment and special protections for refugees & immigrants.
With 'progress thru incremental improvement', this is the legal precedent that your particular political class have set for the rest of us going forward:
We may change direction at any time & in any way we may so choose, as either discretion or expediency dictates, so much so that we can now choose our own futures by reversing course or causing history to reiterate, repeat, cycle or go sideways.
Best
______
@Slim_M: There's no need to explain anything about the y-bottleneck or human history, especially if our host is correct about a teleological absence and, with it, the droll pointlessness of all human activity, accomplishment and the non-existence of right & wrong.
Slim Moldie,
Across all of Europe and Central, East, and South Asia?
That would be an impressive feat!
The sequel would have to explain how they screwed up that level of total control over us. 8)
It would be an interesting story to read to see how it correlates the bottleneck with early efforts to domesticate grains and animals along with our complete domination by women.
------
I saw an interesting side story of someone in our much more recent history. The question asked is to name the man who had the most control ever (in known history) of who bore his children. Harem owners have more control than monogamists, but cheaters even this out a bit. So... the question is who had the biggest 'harem' that we know?
Genghis had the biggest harem?
Loc: I think as you do, yet that is based on fear; and—at times—Envy Of The Future. We’re not going to be alive decades from now, so let’s nag like, like...like...CARPING LITTLE LIBERALS.
Whiny-whine-whine.
...RE Y-chromosome bottleneck,8000 years ago, who is to say the women were not in charge and just having a go at stud breeding? Maybe something along the lines of a Harlan Ellison story?”
Actually. I have been mulling a story set in a future where the Seventh Feminism says screw it, we’ll channel males into competitive situations that benefit US! Polygamy that’s run by and or women (and their children) is a very different thing than the normal kind run by and for lords.
Ah well, it couldn’t last. Locum is back to blah-blah de blah blah. Sigh.
Alfred: “Across all of Europe and Central, East, and South Asia?” My question exactly! I totally do NOT get these reports that the Y-bottleneck happened everywhere and at the same time.
Biggest harem would have to be Chinese and most likely Genghiz Khan (Khan!!!!!) Systematic! Must’ve known cycles and ‘placed’ the impregnated in good homes with incentives for the husbands to provide good care.
@ reason:
What do you mean by "unconditional" here? Because Germany does in fact have birthright citizenship. I know I live in Germany and my children were born here.
I believe you have to decide between 18 and 23. I believe that law was changed a decade or two ago into the current version, so that there are both those with dual and single citizenship around. There were plans to change it back, though I doubt that in the current climate that will happen. Though I suspect the Foreigners' Offices make a difference between nationalities and are less eager to enforce that law on a, say, person with an American or Australian Passport than those with a Turkish one.
Re:Rome:
I think the debate always centers about the wrong part of history.
We should not talk about the fall of the RomanEmpire, we should talk about the fall of the Roman Republic.
There are striking similarities in the polarization of most democracies in the Americas and Europe.(The few Asian ones seem somehow to be immune to this phenomenon).
Left vs.Right. Populares vs. Optimates.
Another thought, just while we are at it and I stumbled over it today: There have been nationalist traditions of revering resistance to the Empire, such as Arminius, Boudica, Mehmet II and maybe even the Parthians.
Regarding the role of the US and the "empire" term that goes around so often, I wanted to link to this article from an actual historian:
https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/
An interesting thing about that article, and against the very concept of historical cycle, is the point that, if nothing else, technology do change the possibilities of politics, and so do change the very nature of what can happens, and the most adaptive response to the events and circumstances.
(From that blog, not strictly related to this discussion, but I also loved a lot the series of articles dedicated to analyze the reality of what Sparta was, and why the modern fetishisation of it by some people is so deeply wrongheaded).
Alfred Differ:
…no drainage other than back into the lake…
Heh. Big City problems.
There's an engineering solution to everything. In the late nineteenth century, Chicago reversed the course of the Chicago River so that it flowed away from the lake into the Des Plaines and on to the Mississippi. The technology involved was useful a decade or so later in constructing the Panama Canal.
Alfred Differ:
"…no way to demonstrate proof of citizenship…"
They'd have to do something stupid like getting people to wear a token analogous of the Star of David. Different tokens for different immigration waves.
It's not even that simple. The US may be a country of many nations, but each nation doesn't reside in its own "homeland". Individuals have been moving where the opportunities are without anything like an internal passport for way too long. And not all immigrants came as part of a "wave". Some took jobs here, or married a citizen. For new babies to have citizenship established through ancestry, they'd have to be able to trace their tree to the first ancestor to arrive on these shores. That's not always even possible.
Not to mention orphans and adoptees.
Dr. Brin
2017 ended up with the lowest count of pages in the Federal Register in quarter century:
"The calendar year concluded with 61,950 pages in the Federal Register this morning.
This is the lowest count since 1993’s 61,166 pages. That was Bill Clinton’s first year, and his own lowest-ever count.
A year ago, Obama set the all-time Federal Register page record with 95,894 pages.
Trump’s Federal Register is a 35 percent drop from Obama’s record, set last year. [ https://cei.org/blog/trump-regulations-federal-register-page-count-is-lowest-in-quarter-century/ ]"
That's pretty serious deregulation.
That problem with feudalism has been illustrated with Putin being surrounded by yes-men who told him what he wanted to hear before they attacked Ukraine.
Alfred Differ: We should've annexed you all [Canada]
Well, this time, bring bug spray and long johns. And some NY cheesecake and southern biscuits & gravy would be greatly appreciated. Problem is, you'd be absorbing nine or ten new blue states. Are Matt & Marjorie ok with that?
Geez, don't feed me straight lines like this. Emphasis mine.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Dec04-5.html
Another bit of bad news is that Christie's name may not appear on the Maine primary ballot. To make it, a candidate needed 2,000 valid signatures by last Friday. Christie submitted 6,000 signatures, but the state's director of elections said that only 844 were certified by local registrars, as required. Christie is appealing.
Dr. Brin, a point of clarification:
You like to say '6000 years of feudalism'. Why specifically 6000? What happened back them? Also, what is your definition of 'feudalism'?
Larry Hart:
The peasants are revolting!
@Paradoctor,
Or as Alan Sherman once put it:
That's why the people are revolting,
'Cause Louis, you're pretty revolting yourself!
Alfred Differ:
Los Angeles had to steal water from essentially everyone they could touch.
As a teenager, I was disgusted away from ever wanting to see the movie Chinatown--I think it was the scene when his nose was cut that did it. Anyway, I totally missed out on that cultural icon until I learned just recently that the plot was about the dealings over water rights in the 30s. That made me finally watch the darn film.
For some reason, I've recently become fascinated by California history in the 30s and 40s.
8000 years ago especially, there was a huge event, a 'Y-chromosome bottleneck when - as told by DNA - for a few centuries only about 15% of male humans reproduced! Look it up.
Dr. Brin, You've mentioned this a few times and it caused an "a hah!" moment for me.
As I mentioned a few times, I was once very interested in the biological underpinnings of the human behaviors that underlie warfare.
Specifically, why in the hell do soldiers participate in wars in which they have little to no biological fitness benefit? Why do they not "give the middle finger" to their commanders like the French Army did by the millions in mid-1917?
[Note: in spring 1917, the French Army appointed a new Field Marshall determined to break trench warfare by "massed firepower." He launched waves of attacks supported by massed artillery at the Germans, resulting in horrific casualties. Eventually, the entire center of the French western front started refusing "over the top" orders. It was likely the biggest coordinated troop rebellion in history.]
Having some exposure to animal behavior biology, my first inclination was to look for animal species who fought mass wars in a similar fashion. The only real models I could come up with were ants/bees/wasps.
Then I looked for similarities between us and these insect species.
There were a surprising amount. Such as: 1) high density population centers (hives/cities), 2) elaborate mass communication (chemical signalling/language) 3) functional ecological segmentation (ecological functions broken down into specialized tasks carried out by sub-groups ie worker bees/economic specialization in humans), 4) a "management class" that synthesizes the efforts of sub-groups into a "social survival machine."
But one difference was these insects tended to severely limit the mating group to "royalty class." Now u mention the Y-chromosome bottleneck, which is recent enough it still impacts our DNA.
Sociobiological theory argues the primary drive of human behavior is to maximize our ability to get our genes into the next generation. When confronted by behaviors that are directly contradictory to this goal, sociobiology theorists tend to look for overarching benefits to the behavior. To me, this was the ability to function within a hierarchy---something I saw as critical to hunting party success for tribal societies).
Where the Y-chromosome bottleneck comes into play is it's another behavioral "pillar" behind human warfare.
John Viril:
Specifically, why in the hell do soldiers participate in wars in which they have little to no biological fitness benefit?
Until recent history (and maybe in some cases even now), wasn't rape and pillage the whole point of being a soldier? The winners got to spread their seed over there so they didn't have to do it over here.
Another explanation might be that there was survival benefit to being a soldier. I remember hearing during the Soviet era that being in the army was one way of getting decent food and shelter. I assume that's true elsewhere as well. Staying in good standing in the army to get the soldiers' perks means doing the job of the army, which includes going to war.
Unless you're Eric Idle:
I heard that if you're in the army, and there's a war, you have to fight in it.
Well, I mean!
So... the question is who had the biggest 'harem' that we know?
Wilt Chamberlain. In his early 90s autobiography, Chamberlain claimed to have had sex with 20,000+ women.
This led to some rather bemused sports pundits wondering how Chamberlain got thru a full practice without a "sex break."
John Viril:
Chamberlain claimed to have had sex with 20,000+ women.
Just by random chance, I'd bet some of those women had multiplicity of more than 1. Not that he'd necessarily know.
Until recent history (and maybe in some cases even now), wasn't rape and pillage the whole point of being a soldier? The winners got to spread their seed over there so they didn't have to do it over here.
LH, I was specifically looking at post-Napoleonic warfare where mass-conscription became the norm.
Earlier wars usually involved a much smaller soldier class which got very well paid. For example, William the Conqueror, who took England with 7k soldiers in 1066, made those troops the new royalty of England.
And yeah, a successful siege pretty much got followed by mass rape from ancient to medieval warfare for certain. As "moral codes" for war became widespread, suddenly sources pretended that rape didn't happen or minimized rape by the "good guys."
The immediate analogy that triggered my interest in grad school was the Vietnam War, where people with means avoided it like the plague. Even though rape was a far more common outcome than our government wanted to admit, I suspect the field soldiers would have had much better mating chances by not serving. The biological urge to refuse was obvious in Vietnam, from the phenomenon of "fragging" officers, draft dodging, and widespread protests Armies also deploy a shitton of behavioral conditioning for new soldiers, as well as socisl and cultural conditioning to get people to fight.
Harem supposes "exclusive access", so I don't think Wilt counts.
One of the biggest ones I've ever heard of is that of Emperor Ashoka, but the same chronicles state he killed over 50 of his own brothers and decapitated 500 ministers who he thought were corrupt, so 10,000 women - a harem city large enough to have its own female police force - may be exaggeration.
Pappenheimer
Hmmm...if history is cyclic, that means it can be described by a sine waves, or at least a series of sine waves...
...and, as Dr. Brin pointed out in The Kiln People, any wave function can be amplified if you can create a standing wave with feedback...
...which mean that, if properly done, we can end history--by amplifying the cycles until it utterly destroys itself! Bwahahahaha...!
We now return to the normal, sane conversation. :)
LH,
I was being somewhat facetious. Most people think Chamberlain was wildly exaggerating.
Pappenheimer:
but the same chronicles state he killed over 50 of his own brothers
Killing your own brothers--especially that many of them!--seems like a bad reproductive strategy for the genes of your common ancestors. However much you personally could spread your genes, you and your brothers could have done more.
John Viril:
I was being somewhat facetious.
I was just running with it.
Saw Ridley Scot's "Napoleon" last weekend.
Made me wonder: Would a world empire ruled by the French be such a bad thing?
The arts and architecture would be exquisite, the (19th century) science would be cutting edge.
All the men would be charming and handsome and all the women would be super models.
And of course the food would be excellent.
DP:
Would a world empire ruled by the French be such a bad thing?
You might ask the Algerians.
A French woman told me this one:
"France is beautiful, too bad it's filled with French people."
Algeria's revolt against France in the 1950s was brutal and nasty, and the French committed routine atrocities and war crimes. As did the Algerian rebels. The Algerian FLN is considered responsible for over 16,000 civilians killed and over 13,000 disappeared between 1954 and 1962 (see the Philippeville massacre). An old movie "Battle of Algiers" does a good job of showing this.
The war was also complicated by the presence on French colonists (pieds-noirs, French for 'Black Feet') who called Algeria home. They would be analogous to Israeli west bank settlers. They were over 15% of the population and formed the majority of the people living in major cities like Oran, Algiers and Bône. Politically it was considered to be part of Metropolitan France, so the horrors of civil war were added to those of terrorism and counter insurgency.
JV
I suggest you read
https://peterturchin.com/books/ultrasociety/
How 10,000 years of warfare made humans the greatest cooperators on planet earth
Larry,
50 brothers,
They were probably harem half-brothers for the most part, so you can kill twice as many for the same genetic effect. Also, don't trust the numbers in a lot of semi-hagiographic history (Ashoka converted to Buddhism and gave up his bloody conquering ways.)
Pappenheimer
Re: France
France was no enlightened conqueror...really, there's no such thing. There are just flavors of worse colonialists. You'd think the Dutch would have been benign, but...no. And then there was Belgium.
A few SF authors have posited a global British Empire as a Good Thing but may have not polled the Irish on this. Harrison's "A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah" was one example. I'm not sure, but the anime Code Geass might be another...
Duncan,
That does seem to use a lot of the same theoretical basis i was coming from in grad school, so long ago. The cite to E.O. Wilson is the guy that is the father of sociobiology.
From the blurb, cultural evolution driven by group competition through warfare sounds congruent with my thinking. Interesting that it mentions bees/wasps/ants though it adds termites which I didn't look at.
Part of the puzzle is that humans rise to the top of the pyramid, and thus only had other humans to largely compete with. Humans also have a lot of what I called "cognitive overrides" in their behavior choices.
JV
The problem with cooperation is the "free Rider" issue where an individual can benefit without sharing the risks
Evolution then "rewards" that strategy
Warfare - especially early "No Quarter" warfare such as we can see in the Bible - then provides an evolutionary advantage
Societies with low levels of cooperation FAIL the test and their member leave no descendants
The stage that led to human dominance was "throwing rocks" - something that rewarded greater accuracy and energy with more food
A larger brain was evolved as you need to make all of the "decisions" before releasing the rock and size = speed
If we look at Karmin (et al)* from 2015, the Y-chromosome bottleneck did NOT happen all over the world at the same time. Close to the same time, but not quite.
[abstract]
It is commonly thought that human genetic diversity in non-African populations was shaped primarily by an out-of-Africa dispersal 50–100 thousand yr ago (kya). Here, we present a study of 456 geographically diverse high-coverage Y chromosome sequences, including 299 newly reported samples. Applying ancient DNA calibration, we date the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) in Africa at 254 (95% CI 192–307) kya and detect a cluster of major non-African founder haplogroups in a narrow time interval at 47–52 kya, consistent with a rapid initial colonization model of Eurasia and Oceania after the out-of-Africa bottleneck. In contrast to demographic reconstructions based on mtDNA, we infer a second strong bottleneck in Y-chromosome lineages dating to the last 10 ky. We hypothesize that this bottleneck is caused by cultural changes affecting variance of reproductive success among males.
The supplemental files for that paper show regional variations. For example, in southern Asia the bottleneck went on for a couple thousand years. In other places it was a quick blip of a few centuries suggesting it might be good support for a sharp change in male reproductive strategies. What I find interesting is they also show a gradual but strong change in male reproductive effectiveness in some regions between 50K years ago and when the ice melted. In other words, long before agriculture there were places where the percentage of men reproducing was already low before the next impact on our effectiveness arrived.
What's even neater in the data is how men had near parity in some places and how in a couple of regions, men caught up REAL quick.
Look at the supplemental files and you'll see the Y bottleneck correlates closely with the arrival of agriculture, but the general ineffectiveness of males before that is still a mystery to me.
* 25:459–466 Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; ISSN 1088-9051/15; www.genome.org
What counts as largest harem does indeed depend on whether exclusive access is in the definition. There ARE weaker versions of 'control' where someone at the top determines who gets access, e.g. Habsburg controls over royal marriages in Europe.
If we go strictly by genetic evidence (preponderance of Y-chromosomes) then grandpa Genghis wins the prize. Whether he had exclusive access wouldn't have mattered since he had sufficient access for his offspring alive today to populate large cities. As a percentage of women alive that he could access, there has probably never been another guy who got close to his record... and might never be another due to the existence of modern weaponry.
I should point out that some of these harems were so large that the women recruited stood a good chance of never even being seen by their putative 'husband'. There's a story of a Chinese concubine who refused to, as customary, bribe the court painter who created images of the women for the Emperor to select among; the artist deliberately made her look ugly in reprisal. The Emperor then had to select a concubine to deliver to some Hun warlord to seal a truce, chose the least beautiful among the paintings as an insult, but immediately fell in love with the poor girl when he finally saw her...being packed off to the steppes. Too late. Map /= territory.
Re: Temujin, if the genetic studies are correct, not sure when he found time to run an empire. A common tactic of the court eunuchs was to bury a young emperor in piles of beautiful women while they ran (and ransacked) the provinces.
Pappenheimer
Paradoc: “You like to say '6000 years of feudalism'. Why specifically 6000? What happened back them? Also, what is your definition of 'feudalism'?”
Good question. We have writing back 4000 years and those writings contain testimony that shed some faint light back roughly another 2 millennia… especially the fundamental fact that there were kings who had powers of life and death over any potential criticism from below. Pyramidal structures of elite males with harems.
We NOW can be pretty sure that 2000 before THAT came the transition TO kings from mere tribal chiefs… and that intermediate phase was viciously violent, resulting in the Y chromosome bottleneck.
Don’t give me the quibble that ‘feudalism’ has a specifically narrower meaning. Most folks ‘get’ it and won’t grasp autarchy.
LH: “For some reason, I've recently become fascinated by California history in the 30s and 40s.”
Huxley’s AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN.
JV: “It was likely the biggest coordinated troop rebellion in history.]”
Hoping for this on the current “Russian Front.”
And yes, the reproductive rights issue mattered a lot 8000 y.a. But I think also… beer.
Then there’s this… https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/189oxii/made_an_eye_of_sauron_treetopper_for_christmas/
Alfred got a link to Karmin etc?
It makes sense that the Y-bottleneck would STOP with real organized agriculture since by then you’d have real kings, who cared about national health and ability to fight other kingdoms, and hence put their foot down to stop wholesale slaughter of his subject males.
It’s earlier, amid SMALL kingdoms… but bigger than tribal chiefdoms … when a gang of thirty or so meanies might slaughter many men to take their wives, especially when porly adapted to the sudden availability of lots of alcohol )beer). It’s no coincidence that such transitions led to most human populations having much better alcohol resilience than other mammals.
If you ever visit the Forbidden City you can see how – with many eunuchs – Ghengiz could be pretty sure of paternity.
Then there’s this… https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/189oxii/made_an_eye_of_sauron_treetopper_for_christmas/
Alfred got a link to Karmin etc?
It makes sense that the Y-bottleneck would STOP with real organized agriculture since by then you’d have real kings, who cared about national health and ability to fight other kingdoms, and hence put their foot down to stop wholesale slaughter of his subject males.
It’s earlier, amid SMALL kingdoms… but bigger than tribal chiefdoms … when a gang of thirty or so meanies might slaughter many men to take their wives, especially when porly adapted to the sudden availability of lots of alcohol )beer). It’s no coincidence that such transitions led to most human populations having much better alcohol resilience than other mammals.
If you ever visit the Forbidden City you can see how – with many eunuchs – Ghengiz could be pretty sure of paternity.
Eye of Sauron
I found this a couple of years ago - made one - still looking for the best place to put it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsSaE9g1Y1w
Its easy and effective
Woah buddy! If you're looking for a bathroom renovator around Brisbane, book us a quote now! Affordable Brisbane bathroom remodel
A note on Chicago.
Chicago grew up where it is originally because it was at the mouth of the Chicago River, which via the "Chicago Portage" (between the Chicago and Des Plaines rivers) enabled a (relatively) easy connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin. In 1848 the Illinois and Michigan Canal was completed, creating a direct water connection.
In 1900 this was replaced by the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, allowing for much larger vessels. This was also part of the project for reversing the flow of the Chicago River, allowing it to drain toward the Mississippi and stopping sewerage from flowing into Lake Michigan, from which Chicago draws its water.
As mentioned earlier, the railroads later connected to Chicago because it was already a transport hub. There is also the geographic factor, which is that the southern end of Lake Michigan is the northernmost point where an east-west rail connection can practically be made. (This is also why three Interstates - 80, 90, and 94 - all come together here.)
The "Deep Tunnel" project - the "giant cavity to take storm water" that David mentions - came much later. (Phase 1 was built from 1975-2006, and Phase 2 is ongoing.) The main water drainage was already redirected toward the Mississippi, as noted above, but expansion of development over the years led to less water retention and more runoff, leading to flooding problems. There were earlier tunnels - as early as the mid-1800s - but they were built to allow water intake from further out in Lake Michigan, avoiding some of the sewerage outflow prior to the change in drainage in 1900.
Apologies if this is too much minutiae, but I lived in Chicago for more than thirty years, and my father was a civil engineer, primarily working with highways, but also with special expertise in water handling.
In the previous, CP said...
If, in a hundred years or so, we have a reasonably stable, high tech civilization that isn't an authoritarian dystopia that will very much be a "win" even if, at that point, we lack the economic, social or psychological motivation to undertake a program of interstellar colonization, build mega-structures in space or teraform Mars.
Yes, we'll continue to use space for communication, data collection, perhaps some specialty manufacturing, limited tourism... And, there may be some use of asteroid resources if that proves economically justifiable. Basic research will continue with ever larger telescopes and various automated probes. But, there will be few manned missions. Nearly everything that can be automated will be, due to the economics. So, the need for humans in space will actually decline as technology improves. Sending useful probes to nearby stars may eventually happen but it will be constrained by diminishing returns...
Meanwhile, there probably won't be a "singularity" when everything changes overnight. But, technology WILL continue to improve in a wide range of fields.
This doesn't seem plausible to me, at least for humans.
One of the basic drivers of "expansion" is human curiosity. This is what drives "basic research" and also improvements in technology. But also expansion. Some people just want to see what is over the next hill, or on the next planet, or in the next solar system. As noted in the "Introduction to Outer Space" produced in 1958: "the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before".
This does not mean that there must be colonies on other planets or other solar systems, but it seems to me that - unless humans change such that curiosity is no longer a driver, which means also an end to research and development - exploration and "expansion" (at least at some level) will continue.
I don't see the "due to economics" being a meaningful factor. After all, if we have access to the resources of the solar system, along with the technology to explore it, then we can explore it if we want to.
I would also suggest that such may also be true for any technological species, because, without that curiosity, it is unlikely that technology will ever develop. After all, developing technology - even so simple a "technology" as a stick to pull termites out of their mound, requires an element of curiosity: "what happens if I do this?"
it seems to me that - unless humans change such that curiosity is no longer a driver, which means also an end to research and development - exploration and "expansion" (at least at some level) will continue.
I can see it stalling if we can send unmanned probes and if the trip is enormously long. Until the drives become fast enough for the trip to be manageable, or we have working cryo sleep, who wants to spend most of their life in a tin can?
Look at the supplemental files and you'll see the Y bottleneck correlates closely with the arrival of agriculture, but the general ineffectiveness of males before that is still a mystery to me.
Well, I think part of the answer for a bottleneck at 50k might b tied up in something I like to call "sperm combat."
In the late 90s, sociobiologists at Oxford found that there are really 3 types of sperm rather than only one. The types are: 1) wrigglers that race to fertilize the egg, 2) hunter/killer sperm that seek out sperm of other males and kill them, 3) barrier sperm that creates a semi- permeable membrane to keep out sperm of other males and allow your own through. Since sperm only survives in the female reproductive tract for 3 days, this suggests a much higher level of female promiscuity than biologists attributed to hunting/gathering societies.
Biologists used to think females had little drive for promiscuity bc one guy vs. a thousand guys made no difference in terms of getting genes into the next gen. The limit was driven by resources and the mechanics of pregnancy.
However, "sperm combat" made biologists rethink that assumption (they attributed female promiscuity in advanced societies to a learned behavior). This combat was an elaborate defense mechanism vs female promiscuity, especially since sperm only survived for 3 days. Thus, it must be frequent in hunting/gathering societies or else it wouldn't have evolved.
Biologists decided that females were pursuing a "quality" mating strategy. Most women will not "land" the most dominant males in the tribe, but will spend most of their fertile years either pregnant, or raising a small vulnerable child that takes enormous resources and parental investment. So she needs that provider/protector to look out for her and her kids.
But, if she could cheat on that subordinate male and get him to squander his resources raising the child of a competitor, it would b like landing an alpha in terms of capturing successful male genes.
So her optimal mating strategy, if she can't land an alpha, is to lie to the beta male she chumps into taking care of her and bang an alpha on the side (whom she gets pregnant by).
Research in Germany revealed that women going into nightclubs showed more skin when they were at their peak fertility (saliva test). Further, biologists discovered that female orgasm actually plays a role in increasing fertility. Biologists used to think that female orgasm wasn't relevant to fertility, but then realized orgasm helped move sperm through the reproductive tract.
Thus, biologists created a behavior model that suggested women are more likely to cheat during peak fertility, and more likely to have orgasms with an interloper than her "regular" guy. Consequently, her pregnancy rate would be higher with guys she cheats with over her mate.
Part 1 end
Sperm Combat Patt 2
The Oxford studies also showed that regular guy, pretty much the first thing he wants to do is have sex. But, something odd happens: his sperm count triples after she has been away and could have cheated on him. [BTW, the 3X sperm count only happens when she leaves. It's not related to not having sex with her for a number of days.]
Thus, what he's doing is trying to overwhelm the sperm combat defenses of any guy she might have cheated with during her trip.
Perhaps the answer to Karim's 50k bottleneck is that the sperm defenses weren't so developed, and thus women tended to get pregnant by the alpha males she cheats with more than her mate.
Imagine this: agriculture develops creating economic specialization, and bigger status differences. Most males farm, but the biggest/strongest dominant males become warriors. So the warrior band travels around, sort of like pro athletes today, and rack up huge "scores." But, "sperm combat" isn't as developed, so the pregnancy rates are higher when women cheat. The "sperm combat" develops, and the mating effectiveness of subordinate males goes up.
Dr. Brin, the alphas don't necessarily need to kill the subordinates, they just need to get the women pregnant on a regular basis.
John Viril: who wants to spend most of their life in a tin can?
I wouldn't mind spending my life in a generational ship. The chance to contribute so much to Humanity while playing with vast computers and memory banks would be paradise for me. Here's the rub: I couldn't possibly sentence my kids to the solitary life I chose. That's similar to the plot of PASSENGERS (2016). The most awkward conversation imaginable. One of the triumphs of the enlightenment is the realization that your kids' life belongs to them, not the king, not the church, not the nation, not their parents.
Scidata:
We don't have data about people confined for years in a tin can, but we do have data about people confined for years. It's called "imprisonment", and the data suggests that their behavior deteriorates.
In the series "Babylon 5", Sheridan told Garibaldi that he missed trees.
David Brin 9:46:
You derive 6000 years from indirect mythological testimony, and DNA evidence. Fine. Jared Diamond asked: what happens to the losers of tribal wars? He answered: in hunter-gatherer ("savage") societies, the losers are expelled from the land, to starve or wander or expel some other tribe. In early agricultural ("barbarian") societies, the losers are slaughtered, man woman and child. This would explain the Y bottleneck. In settled agricultural societies ("civilized") they are enslaved. Nowadays we prefer bread-and-circuses.
I ask after your definition of 'feudal' not to quibble but for clarity's sake. I gather than you take it to mean... non-autarky? Non-democratic? You say that most people get it, but I'm not most people, I don't get it.
John Viril:
Cryo-sleep? I don't buy it. Back in ancient Egypt, they preserved meat by beef-jerkifying it, so they figured that jerkifying a corpse will preserve it. Nowadays we preserve meat by refrigeration, so we figure that refrigerating a corpse will preserve it. Bah humbug. Show me someone revived from mummification and/or freezing; then I'll buy it.
Paradoctor:
...people confined for years in a tin can...
In the series "Babylon 5", Sheridan told Garibaldi that he missed trees.
For generational-type travel to be workable, I think we'll first need holodeck technology.
Paradoctor:
Nowadays we preserve meat by refrigeration, so we figure that refrigerating a corpse will preserve it.
In the future, we'll preserve meat by dematerializing it with a transporter and then rematerializing it when we want to eat it.
So then we'll figure that dematerializing a human being will preserve it.
Maybe we'll eventually be able to 3-D print human beings at the end of the journey.
We can even sidestep the question of whether the same human being can survive the experience. All that matters is that humanity takes root on the new planet. It doesn't have to be any particular humans who get there.
An issue with the Sperm Combat hypothesis, it is a very low order probability that 50K years would have been enough time for the "sexual arms race" to have resulted in such significant changes.
Paradoctor: the data suggests that their behavior deteriorates
I fully agree. I'm always on about how people can be 'turned' given time, patience, and syntonicity (empathy). We don't try very hard. I personally am a bit of a Solarian (in a nice way :), so isolation doesn't scare me, as long as there are at least computers to talk to. Of course, that gives rise to this question: Is what arrives at the destination star still human?
scidata:
I personally am a bit of a Solarian (in a nice way :), so isolation doesn't scare me,
Oh, me too. That's why I was able to stay saner than many during the forced isolation of COVID. "Now, I'll have a chance to catch up on my technical journals!"
Of course, that gives rise to this question: Is what arrives at the destination star still human?
That's why it would be better to just 3-D print them at the end, rather than have them survive the journey.
Darrell, hmmm maybe "sperm combat" developed around 50k years ago at the tail end of long development. Thus, you had a Y bottleneck that changes 50K yrs ago.
Then agriculture comes along and brings big status differences, economic specialization, a new management class that synthesizes the specialized sectors (which only provides a price of what a person needs to survive) into a whole social survival machine. That shift will cause a burst of new selective pressures and u might get the kind of punctuated equilibrium burst of genetic changed that Lynn Margolis theorized.
So, suppose the 3X sperm count response develops following the invention of agriculture (about 12k years ago). Perhaps it would be in response to increased status differences favoring alphas.
Tripling an already established system might not take so much selection.
Paradoctor. Tardigrades can be revived after being frozen for 30 years. Artic ground squirrels hibernate at below zero temps.
Viril:
I am not a tardigrade, or even a ground squirrel.
As for sperm combat: citation, please. Does it happen in other species?
As for skiffy ways of cheating death: I'm. Not. Buying. It. First show me someone who survived the process, in good health.
Let's start with mummification. Yes, I count that as skiffy. A Pharaoh demummified would surely be awful thirsty at first. And he'll need new brains, for it was normal practice to scoop them out. Whoops!
Now for freezing, the modern meat-preservation method. My experience of thawing meat suggests that any former corpsicle would feel really, really bad. We're talking about years of rehab, and they're never the same afterwards. Not far-star pioneer material.
3-D printing?! Do you print them from the feet up or the head down? How do you oxygenate the extremities mid-printing? Or keep the half-printed body from bleeding out? How does half a heart pump, or half a lung breathe?
Delayed transporter materialization? I grant that Star Trek showed Scotty surviving that; but his redshirt companion did not. I'm not thrilled.
All of these are a lot more fiction than science. The science suggests that it's impossible. 2nd Law and all that. The only known antidote to death is reproduction: TOKATDIR.
John Viril,
Another issue, all of the sperm characteristics you've described could as easily have arisen via only competition between males rather than competition between cheating females and males. Of course the most likely case is that both, and more, shaped this aspect of our evolution.
Regarding the rate of evolution, the evidence is clear that easy to distinguish changes can happen relatively quickly, but that isn't the norm. I wonder if there have been any studies attempting to identify any of the genes associated with male sperm production and also to estimate how old they are, in other words to establish a timeline of when changes to those genes occurred.
Re: 3D printing vs TOKATDIR
Piers Anthony took a shot at surviving a singularity in "Macroscope". Not sure if it was a wormhole, black hole, or de-re-materialization (read it many decades ago). Life (above tardigrade scale) many be like a river. If you dam or otherwise interrupt it, it's not the same river ever again. Anthony's solution to testing the before & after instance was, shall we say, intimate.
The problem with 3D printing people is that it only has 3-dimensions. It doesn't have the vectors of everything that is moving within our bodies. With the constant flux of electrons in our brains, changing our brain connections with their movements and influencing other electrons, I very much doubt that a person's personality would survive in the duplicate. It would basically be a duplicate corpse that comes out of the printer, or at best a mindless newborn in an adult body. :(
Paradoctor,
Cite for multiple sperm morphologies with a species: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28568578/
It happens in multiple species. What I call "sperm combat" is more typically called "sperm competition" and u can find multiple sites about it with a simple web search. Heck, even wikipedia has a general info entry
Paradoctor,
Cite for sperm competition in Humans:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176016/
Supposedly, the level of sperm competition in humans is relatively low.
The science suggests that it's impossible. 2nd Law and all that. The only known antidote to death is reproduction: TOKATDIR.
You should Google Dr. David Sinclair. Best known anti aging expert in the world. He's a bench scientist with the juice to get on Joe Rogan.
Anyway, Sinclair thinks we age bc of the chemicals that attach to our DNA and change its conformational shape. He calls this the information theory of aging.
As for the 2nd law of thermodynamics, isn't that assuming a closed system? Biological systems aren't closed. Life includes continuous inputs.
One recent Nobel Prize discovery which defies your interpretation of the 2nd law is the Yamanaka factors that covert mature cells back to totipotency (undifferentiated stem cells that can become anything.)
Sinclair says if you use 4 instead of all 5 Yamanaka factors you can dial back the biological clock to youth instead of going back to stem cells. He's currently doing it with optic nerve cells from mice.
Another issue, all of the sperm characteristics you've described could as easily have arisen via only competition between males rather than competition between cheating females and males.
One piece of info I left out was that cultural anthropologists reported that hunting gathering societies were showing more female promiscuity than they previously reported. They attributed it to reluctance to speak about it to outsiders.
If you overdose on Yamanaka factors then do you turn into a blob?
Rejuvenation I _almost_ believe. But again, show me someone who did it. Then shoot me up.
Rejuvenant’s Heir
an Underfable
Once upon a time a Rejuvenant once again had his blood changed, his telomeres lengthened and his neurotransmitters boosted. Thus refreshed, he vowed to review his oldest life.
So he visited his oldest haunts. He found them partly matching his rebrightened memories; but also partly transformed with time. The Rejuvenant shrugged this off. “But I myself remain the same. I remember the old me so well!”
He recalled, with crystal clarity, where he hid a personal journal centuries ago. He found it in that exact spot. The pages were yellow and brittle; the ink had faded to invisibility.
Undaunted, he scanned the pages with ultraviolet light. He recovered the text and he read it; but he saw that the man who wrote it had nothing in common with him. That man’s beliefs, tastes and habits were not his. The Rejuvenant’s memory claimed continuous identity, but the text proved that to be an illusion.
The Rejuvenant said, “Then I have already died. I am no longer me; I am my heir.”
Moral: The best memory does not equal the palest ink.
Comment: What is identity?
Paradoc, pretty much. Sinclair says go back to far and you end up a mass of tumors
Rejuvenation I _almost_ believe. But again, show me someone who did it. Then shoot me up.
Sinclair's working on it. Has used his technique on optic nerve cells from elderly blind mice. (Mice typically go blind when they get old). Transforms them, reinjects them and the mice can see again.
Paradoctor:
he saw that the man who wrote it had nothing in common with him. That man’s beliefs, tastes and habits were not his.
Dave Sim's Cerebus project was conceived as 300 issues of a unified story written by a single author over 26 years (because the first several issues were bi-monthly). But what he inadvertently demonstrated was that 2004-Dave Sim was not really "the same author" as 1977 Dave Sim. Beliefs, tastes, and habits indeed.
What is identity?
In this particular context of longevity, the answer would seem to have to do with the self-preservation instinct. Identity is preserved from moment to moment as "that which resists dying."
...or maybe more accurately, as "that which perceives that it has resisted dying."
JV: “I can see it stalling if we can send unmanned probes and if the trip is enormously long.”
Not if the ‘unmanned’ probes are schooled and raised to think of themselves as versions of human, who happen to be able to breathe vacuum and sleep across vast stretches of time.
The cheating-female is seen across nature, but there are problems calling it a truly major driver of human evolution.
Take the “Aaron genes.” Isolated groups of Jews appear to have preserved Jewish sperm genes across millennia, even when surrounded by bullying rapists. And especially the cohenim… purportedly descendants of Moses’s brother. Either his sperm genes were/are especially mighty(!) … or else those wives were very faithful across difficult centuries.
There are other such cases. So no. I doubt the Sperm Combat theory is as tenable as the notion that an intermediate phase at the dawn of agriculture, allowed proto-kings – and beer – to violently cull 80%+ of males from fatherhood.
Dr. Brin (from the previous post)
> “Art and other cultural matters are likely to be mutually
> incomprehensible”
>
> I disagree. Though that is the bias of an artist in a society that’s
> addicted to eclectic ‘otherness’.
I don't think we disagree that much... When I was writing, I was thinking about how art and other aspects of culture would translate between species with substantially different sensory systems. For example, if representatives of trichromatic and tetrachromatic species each painted the same landscape, then exchanged canvases, would they perceive the other's product as intrinsically beautiful, let along meaningful? And, that would be a fairly minor difference... However, each could probably learn to understand the differences intellectually (and, even develop a "map" of how their opposite number perceived things). So "incomprehensible" was a bit strong.
Gregory Byshenk:
> One of the basic drivers of "expansion" is human curiosity. This is
> what drives "basic research" and also improvements in technology...
>
> I don't see the "due to economics" being a meaningful factor. After
> all, if we have access to the resources of the solar system, along
> with the technology to explore it, then we can explore it if we want
> to...
Curiosity drives exploration. I'm not suggesting that it be suppressed. In fact, I would be very disappointed if it was. Economic, resource and cultural pressures drive colonization. That's a different thing, entirely. The first can occur without the latter.
What I'm suggesting is that we will need to make a transition from an expansionist to a post-expansionist culture in order to solve the environmental, social and economic problems that we currently face. And, that the barriers to successfully doing "big things in space" are sufficiently high that they probably won't be a significant factor in doing so (nor, will they provide a viable "escape hatch" if we fail). If we succeed in making the transition to a stable post expansionist culture, the pressure to colonize will largely be eliminated. Hence, I suspect that we will simply choose not to do so. Exploration will, hopefully, continue unabated.
A few thoughts that may (or may not) be relevant to the current subject:
Highly social behavior tends to evolve when the probability of isolated individuals (or even bonded pairs) successfully raising young is very low. This was probably very much true in the competitive and predator rich environments in which we evolved. So, although competition for mates would still occur within social groups, in the long-term, behaviors/traits that stabilize in-group bonds should have been favored. For that reason, the basic extended family/clan/band of half a dozen to a few dozen is, in a sense, the fundamental reproductive unit for humans (rather than the individual). If a band isn't sufficiently stable to fulfill its protective functions, none of it's members are likely to reproduce.
If a band isn't sufficiently xenophobic, it can't control resources in a competitive environment and is more vulnerable to transmissible diseases. If it's too xenophobic, it becomes highly inbred--harmful recessives are amplified and immune systems start breaking down. So, a "happy medium" is favored--a moderate amount of inbreeding so that individuals benefit from assisting relatives but a tendency for adolescents to switch bands in order to prevent excessive inbreeding. "Love at first sight" might be an evolved mechanism to smooth the integration of transiting individuals into their new bands (there's some recent primate work indicating that such individuals are usually first accepted by one resident who then acts as a "sponsor"...).
Bonds in primate groups are primarily mediated by social grooming. And, I suspect what we consider "sexual behavior" in humans is substantially derived from social grooming rather than from mating behavior. As in Bonobos, intercourse was probably re-purposed as an intense form of social grooming. There's also some recent work suggesting that grooming-mediated, same-sex bonds are often more durable than inter-sex bonds...
Successful bands tend to reproduce by fission. They grow in size till they become too large to maintain stable internal bonds, then split. So, reproduction of human bands is roughly analogous to asexual reproduction in microbes (with a high degree lateral gene transfer--the transitioning adolescents). And, that's probably been very important historically. Evolution of higher levels of organization is roughly analogous to the evolution of multi-cellular organisms...
When higher levels of organization became advantageous, perhaps it was necessary to weaken in-band bonds in order to circumvent instinctive triggers of xenophobia? Perhaps, by shifting functions of the band both upward to the band-federation/tribe and downward to the nuclear family?
David,
Karmin et al (2015)
I'm not sure the proto-king idea works… at least not in South Asia. In that region it looks like the bottleneck went on for almost 3000 years. That should be enough time for some men to rise to the top and then see other men as sources of tax income to compete with 'sexual competitor' idea. In other regions the bottleneck was shorter (closer to your 'a few centuries' amount) but the timing appears to be different.
I'm cautious about reading to much into their graphs because the study was written in 2014. We probably have MUCH larger data sets to examine nowadays and might even have coverage of the New World and better coverage of the Siberian portion of Asia. The paper seems to have a focus on the older bottleneck relating to our emergence from Africa (modern humans), so I'd guess there are more recent studies of the newly available data I haven't seen yet.
What I find striking in the Karmin data, though, is the relatively poor performance of males BEFORE the ice melted in places that had it and would later be warm enough for agriculture AFTER other regions had done the hard work of domesticating some grains and animals. That makes me suspect there was at least one other factor in play when proto-kings were slashing to control larger territories. The food supply for their people might have been very poor in the nutritional sense. Plentiful, but weak. It doesn't take a lot to keep a person alive, but standards have to be a little higher to get them to reproduce successfully… meaning their kids do too.
Larry Hart:
How much of me is me?
John,
The bottleneck closer to the 50K line is probably just an out-of-Africa population. Apparently... not many people made the crossing.
Remember that what we think of ourselves is actually a small group of homo sapiens that emerged to take over the entire species (pretty much) not long ago. That small group was like trapped in a climate refuge in Africa where 'something mysterious happened' that set us apart behaviorally. Whatever it was turned out to be a huge winner because that group exploded when the refuge barrier broke.
What we are seeing is that 'out of Africa' happened more than once over the ages. People who left earlier and populated much of the world got supplanted by a later wave. Africa is where the bulk of humanity's genetic diversity is AND it's a huge place.
Alfred,
An "out of Africa" bottleneck does make sense.
an intermediate phase at the dawn of agriculture, allowed proto-kings – and beer – to violently cull 80%+ of males from fatherhood.
One problem with this idea is that such a society is going to be much closer to subsistence than an established agricultural society. Wiping out 80% of males "by violence" would have serious negative impacts on farm productivity and hunting efficiency.
I'm not saying a society composed of a 5 to 1 ratio of women over men couldn't survive, but it would be more vulnerable to catastrophy.
If such a culling occurred by violence, I'd bet it was more likely widespread adoption of castration for non- elite males.
That way, you'd retain a lot of the economic labor efficiency. Look at the performance advantages trans women still have in athletic competition over natal women after chemical castration.
Paradoctor:
That man’s beliefs, tastes and habits were not his. The Rejuvenant’s memory claimed continuous identity, but the text proved that to be an illusion.
While I get the point, I think it confuses the map with the territory. A person can learn new things or disagree with the opinions one once held without creating a paradox.
The Rejuvenant said, “Then I have already died. I am no longer me; I am my heir.”
Again, that's a metaphor. The Rejuvenant has changed, but he hasn't died in the sense of going through the physical sufferings one associates with death. He hasn't drowned or been crushed or electrocuted or anything of that sort. The metaphorical death described above is no more frightening than the fact that a baby stops being a baby and becomes a child, a teenager, and an adult.
How much of me is me?
The thing is, so much of "identity" is a matter of perception. The house I grew up in is still there, but features have been added to the exterior (and maybe inside too--how would I know?) Does that mean it's not "the house I grew up in" any more? That's more of a subjective question than one might think.
Is grandfather's axe still grandfather's axe, even though the blade has been replaced three times and the handle twice?
"The American people" contains no one who lived here in 1789. "Congress" contains no one who was elected back then either, but somehow the institution retains a kind of identity. Even the rules of baseball and football change from year to year, but "baseball" is still baseball and isn't confused with hockey or jai alai.
LH, yeah. The body turns over most of your cells every 7 years
John Viril:
The body turns over most of your cells every 7 years
Agreed, but I'm taking the (apparently) unpopular stance on the meaning of that. Most people say "Therefore, there's no such thing as 'your body'". I'm contending "Therefore, the concept of 'identity' is more malleable than we usually think--in all cases." That is, if the concept of "identity" depends upon eternal unchangingness, the concept is meaningless in any practical sense.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/016477v2.full
Let me add this to the bottleneck discussion: Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe (via Mikethemadbiologist).
JR
That is, if the concept of "identity" depends upon eternal unchangingness, the concept is meaningless in any practical sense.
LH, I agree. With social entities like a sports team, a corporation, or a nation state, underlying culture/common history creates the social identity.
With a human being, we still identify a person as the same individual even after most of their cells have turned over.
In a real sense, our human identity is wrapped up in memory cells and CNS nerves that do not regenerate. The rest of the body is replaceable without any fundamental change in identity.
In all cases other than sentient beings, "identity" has to do with perception by others. The rules of baseball change, but we still consider the modern game to be "baseball" and not something else. The population of a country turns over, but we still identify the geographic location under a continuity of government as the same country. Etc.
For sentient beings, there are really two different concepts of identity. There's what I perceive as continuity with my past self, and what others perceive as continuity with my past self. In extreme situations, those two perceptions might not be in synch. Is an oldster in the throes of dementia "the same person" as the one he used to be, albeit greatly altered? Or has he "died" and a changeling taken over his body? I'm not sure everyone would answer the same way.
In sci-fi like Star Trek, the characters actually debate whether someone retains their identity after being matter-transported. Again I don't think the question has been definitively answered. I'm not even sure how one would go about testing it.
A caustic riff about the Sam Altman/OpenAI imbroglio includes: “The companies operating agreement – to investors – says – in writing: ‘It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.’ Documents like this – that were written by an actual lawyer – highlight the problems we are starting to see from the combined popularity of science fiction in Silicon Valley and widespread microdosing of hallucinogens.”
Clever snark. And it misses the point entirely. No one... not one pundit or genius AI guy or philosopher that I've seen - asks the truly important question: "How did we deal with past crises, when new technologies multiplied what humans can know, see and pay attention-to? How did we deal with past waves of toxicities spread by organic human liars, using those tech tools, ranging from printing presses to radio and TV?
We did deal with those tech waves and with those liars, using the Enlightenment's chief invention, reciprocal accountability. And yet, where - in all of this fuss - is anyone looking to the methods that have actually served us well, to see if they can be applied, yet again?
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=56588
All these condemnations of male mating strategies, harem formation, the feudal patriarchy & the associated y-bottleneck imply that the female gender have been & still are the powerless passive nonparticipating victims in historical human mate selection, which is a simultaneously absurd & counterfactual assertion, as the modern female mating strategy under feminism (in conjunction with computer-aided mate selection) has led directly to the abandonment of traditional monogamy & the recapitulation of a Pareto Distribution-driven female breeding strategy.
Available data shows that feudal harem formation is a function of an unrestricted female selection bias:
63% of young western males are single but only 34% of young females are
A majority of young western males describe themselves "romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless and lonely"
30% of young western males report "no sex in the last year"
41% of all US infants are born to single unmarried women (and)
The women of OKCupid rate 80% of western men as "below average".
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-young-men-are-single-most-young-women-are-not/
https://medium.com/hello-love/women-say-80-of-men-are-below-average-bab0b8af2606
That women & women alone are the raison d'etre behind feudalism, the traditional male mating strategy, harem formation, the evil patriarchy & the associated y-bottleneck, this has been an open secret for decades, as illustrated by the plot from each & every Hallmark film ever made.
Will the modern liberated woman choose to mate with the irresistibly rich, powerful & handsome feudal prince or her boorishly below-average uncultured boyfriend?
It's not much of a puzzler as they choose the feudal prince every time.
Best
Dr. Brin,
The "advanced tips" about writing u mentioned in the link u listed awhile back, were they listed in the links after that advice for new writers post?
Larry,
It may not actually be Theseus' ship any more, but he'll fight you if you try to take it from him.
Pappenheimer
P.S. Speaking of Theseus, if Mary Renault's novel is in any way accurate, the guy may have been responsible for a localized paternity bottleneck in the Bronze Age Peloponnese...him and that king of Thebes who fielded an infantry company of his own sons.
It’s happened to many of us losers: the lady chooses someone more interesting.
You too? Why don’t you paint us a picture?
The controlling partner in OpenAI was… get this… a non-profit.
OF COURSE investments in the partnership should have been understood as donations. The major partner doesn't answer to shareholders and CAN'T be overly interested in the ROI of its minor partners.
The only interpretation of 'investment' that makes any sense there is for the sharing of rights to the products produced. The invested money is not just sunk… it's funding work primarily controlled by an entity that isn't allowed to be focused on profits for anyone.
I don't think that's what the fight was about though. I used to sit on the Board of a 501(c)3 and odd things happen when egos are more important than profits. In a large, for-profit corp you can usually count on Directors understanding the risk of shareholder lawsuits because they have specialized legal staff advising them on what NOT to do. Not so with a lot of non-profits. Some are so weak in all that they can't even file their taxes correctly.
John,
One problem with this idea is that such a society is going to be much closer to subsistence than an established agricultural society.
There may be a problem with this statement too. A lot of us make assumptions about the labor required to get by for the average human across the ages. We have been learning that some of these beliefs are likely incorrect.
For example, most nomadic HG's had leisure time. They weren't hunting and gathering and dealing with the minutia that kept them alive all the time. In contrast, early agricultural communities likely had a LOT less leisure. It's possible later agricultural groups did too.
Any group with leisure time has a surplus of people with respect to minimal subsistence tasks. The easiest surplus to work around is excess males IF the tasks don't require the skills where we have a slight edge over females. That was probably the case most of the time in agricultural groups because men and women can sow, weed, and reap about equally well while a man trying breast feed an infant isn't likely to keep it alive.
Wiping out large numbers of men WOULD cut the labor available in the field, but the same will hold true in more established (Kings with more turf) agricultural cultures.
—————
I think the beer/culling argument of our host was probably a factor, but I doubt it was large enough to account for all the males who failed to reproduce. I think poor nutrition killing fathers while they were young would have been enough* to dramatically lower reproductive odds for second or third born sons. If only the first born son and all daughters have children, you get close to the numbers we see in the bottleneck.
* Being perpetually drunk certainly would have contributed, but humanity's partial resistance to alcohol poisoning had to be introduced at some point as a needed adaptation. Poorly nutritious food would have required consumption of alcohol just to survive… but early agricultural people might not have had much resistance. Look to what distilled alcoholic drinks do to native tribes who walked away from Asian HG's long before the ice melted for example.
men and women can sow, weed, and reap about equally
Alfred,
Ummm.....how much farm labor have u done? I can't say I've done a lot, but my mom grew up on a farm so I have a little exposure from my grandparents. Men are SIGNIFICANTLY more efficient.
Sowing and weeding aren't that different. But, I seriously contest reaping with a scythe. Men are going to be far more efficient. Throw in jobs like plowing (or hoeing), or lugging water, chopping wood, clearing rocks from a field, and hauling all kinds of equipment and men have a substantial productivity advantage.
Military data also highlights what would have been a much worse problem for a society with rudimentary healing skills. Women are 3x more likely to be undeployable than men. One big reason is female troops are much more prone to orthopedic injury.
In primitive conditions, women won't have orthopedic hospitals to treat their injuries. Today's female soldiers are unable to work 3x more often than men even supported by modern medicine. What happens to the labor pool when u get 3x more crippling injuries and you can't fix a rotator cuff?
Pappenheimer:
It may not actually be Theseus' ship any more, but he'll fight you if you try to take it from him.
Heh. In Arthur Clarke's Imperial Earth, the narrator wryly notes the language in a contract which mentions "the moon Titan, currently in orbit around the planet Saturn".
...how you going keep a woman down on the ranch
after she’s seen Paree?
Here's an excellent essay on hunter gatherers.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-hunter-gatherers-demonstrate-about-work-and-satisfaction
There's some mathematical issues with Alan_B's Male Loser Allegation, as marriage & divorce rates in the West have declined by 50% (in the case of marriage) or increased to 50% (as in the case of divorce), being indicative of large societal trends rather than the failings of a few random male losers.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Marriage_and_divorce_statistics#:~:text=Since%201964%20(the%20first%20year,1964%20to%203.9%20in%202021).
Although attributed by Dr. Brin to 'Bad Patriarchy' and/or 'Feudalism', it's quite remarkable that all those historical breeding bottlenecks are most typical of non-monogamous tribal cultures [like Islam] where women either choose or 'are compelled to choose' (depending on one's perspective) the most wealthy & powerful males with which to mate, as opposed to the women of the enlightenment tradition who either choose or 'are compelled to choose' monogamy from a selection of low quality males such as myself & Alan_B.
Furthermore, it was MONOGAMY rather than other liberal-progressive feminist policies that originally led to our fading western socioeconomic successes, as it was monogamy (along with cultural limits on female mating choices) which once gave all of those 'loser men' reason (aka 'skin-in-the-game') to support, contribute to & defend the wellbeing of this once all-inclusive society.
Of course, those days are long gone and, increasingly, it's the disenfranchisement of those 100+ million western 'loser men' (who, after being thrown onto the cultural rubbish heap, now lack skin-in-the-game and couldn't care less about supporting, contributing to & defending this our non-inclusive society') that has led directly to our ongoing 'slo-mo' social collapse .
And that's why so many American males just don't want to fight for their country anymore:
https://www.newsweek.com/american-military-recruitment-problems-public-apathy-1842449
But, as the kiwis say, no worries. All those non-monogamous women can always PURCHASE support, contributions & protections from those 30+ million professionals 'who know things' after the male loser majority disengages, as long as all those 'empowered' women remain ever so grateful & obedient to their new caretakers & masters.
Funny that, how what our fine host calls 'liberal-progressive enlightenment' is actually gender feudalism repackaged into a slightly different technocratic form.
Best
_______
It all boils down to the most basic principle of collectivism & libertarianism: What's in it for me?
For, without mutual benefit, there can be no durable relationship, just a temporary association that ends in bad feelings & exploitation.
Loc, now you’re back to making some sense; my issue has been with certain preposterous notions of yours—such as we here are angling for absolute equality; and half of us think we aren’t going to die(?)
Remember, though, that there were/are many feminist creeds. Long ago I attended feminist lectures on ‘Gyn-Ecology’ and ‘Rapism’; some lecturers complained how it was during the late ‘50s when men began to loosen the bonds of matrimonial responsibility—and naturally, along came the Pill a few yrs later.
I think one of you made an interesting point that maybe 8000ya the new mostly grain diet supported large populations but with low sperm counts. Still not as pretty picture, despite being less violent than the other (more likely) explanation. (The well-ded lords would still be servicing the women/wives.)
---
locum’s point about lonely young males is an utter yawner! It has ALWAYS been that way! OMG young women get attention from all males for obvious reasons and in all societies and eras. It was – and is – hard and lonely to be a young male. Esp now that vast numbers are no longer bled off to wars.
AND IT IS hard and lonely to be an older female. Geez, when locum finally gets arounf to saying something that’s not a strawman untruth, then like Captain Obvious he points “Look what I just realized!!!” at what everyone already knew, like it’s new.
His first paragraph on MONOGAMY! Raised some interesting points… which he spoilt (as usual) with subsequent jibber-frothing, alas.
In fact, ALL societies practiced about 30% polygamy, which matches the sexual size dimorphism charts. Societies differ according to WHICH STYLE od polygamy it is. Top lords grabbing attractive young fems without asking them? (Locum, in such a society you would not have been one of the lords, sorry.) In a few, the women chose the male chiefs and a chief’s first wife would be the one to decide when and which younger woman to invited into the tent. Which worked best for ALL concerned, since he’s happiest if they like each other.
Alas, poor locum knows about none of that, only fantasies of being Top Dog.
---
JV “The "advanced tips" about writing u mentioned in the link u listed awhile back, were they listed in the links after that advice for new writers post?”
Nope it’s something I email folks. But maybe I should post it in a blog. If you are clever enough to track me down by email, then you have earned the advanced tips!
Preposterous notions of mine, Alan_B ??
Such as we here are angling for absolute equality? As in this essay wherein opportunity equality & outcome equality are said to overlap, and the redistribution & equalization of outcome (wealth) is redefined as the equalization & redistribution of opportunity?
https://evonomics.com/the-fairness-divide-intervention-that-liberals-and-can/
Such as half of us thinking we aren't going to die? As in this essay about how man will eventually cheat death?
https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/immortality.html
These are our host's contentions, not mine -- which is all well & good -- as our host is not only required to believe at least 6 impossible things before breakfast, but it is his chosen profession to make other people believe these fictions as true, and he is quite good at what he does.
I know that the fix is in & that I will never be 'top dog', which is why I no longer play & have no further skin-in-this-rigged-enlightenment-game that Dr. Brin wishes to preserve, just as he would sacrifice neither himself nor his offspring if he & his could never hope to win.
Western feminists have long equated monogamy to involuntary servitude & bondage, giving birth to the assertion that "women don't owe men anything" which means, in turn, that men owe these thankless women nothing too, and so the West descends to rack & ruin.
Cheers.
John,
Don't get too hooked on the notion of scythe wielding men being the model reapers. It is useful to remember that we domesticated more than one variety of grain and had to because they don't all grow equally well where people used to live shortly after the ice melted. For example, in eastern Asia (modern China really) you find ancient evidence for millet cultivation further north and rice cultivation further south with some overlap areas that shifted with the climate.
Rice does not require large guys with large scythes to reap. In fact, such an approach would have been unwise along the Yangtze until about 6500 years ago. The ancestor grass variant relying on 'shattering' to spread its seed when it was ripe. Strike the stalk too hard and all the seeds are sitting on the ground where it is debatable whether it is worth your calorie expenditure to pick them up again. Non-shattering variants didn't show up along the middle Yangtze until 6500 years ago and then a few centuries later on the lower Yangtze.
If you live in a community reliant on a shattering variety, you'll reap the seeds before they are fully mature. Your descendants (if you have any) will benefit from larger grains once domestication is further along because they managed to produce variants that shattered with a slight delay. This change is likely to have an impact on the nutritional value of a bowl of rice your descendants get.
What I find interesting about the story of rice in east and south-east Asia… is the Y bottleneck began to end when the non-shattering variants arrived.
—————
Women are 3x more likely to be undeployable than men.
I asked a Marine about this once and he offered a very simple explanation. They are all riflemen of some kind carrying their equipment, but they are expected to be able to pick up another fully-loaded injured marine and carry him off the field of battle. It's hard enough for a lot of guys to do this, but there is just enough size dimorphism between men and women to make this a challenge for a larger fraction of women. So… mixed gender units are not likely to be front-line combat units.
That was his argument for it. I'm still skeptical because that just means fewer women would make the cut… but not all.
Throw in jobs like plowing (or hoeing), or lugging water, chopping wood, clearing rocks from a field, and hauling all kinds of equipment and men have a substantial productivity advantage.
Uhm. No. We are stronger in some ways, but many of them can whup us in terms of endurance. Our primary productivity advantage is that we do NOT become pregnant. We can be in the fields during the short times when women are so inconvenienced they waddle.
As for my experience with this… it's about zero in the personal sense, but my first girlfriend grew up on a farm. I learned a bit from her and her father. I've lived in rural places and near enough to farms to see things, but that doesn't really count anymore. Everything is SO mechanized that a farmer needs more finance skills than they need experience with the land or the muscle to move it.
I don't believe guys offer a huge productivity difference. I'm willing to listen to evidence for it, but I'll be listening carefully for cultural biases.
Forgot to offer a reference for the history of rice.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759204/
Re: Farming
A big part of it is animal 'whispering'. Breeding, raising, training, coaxing, calming, almost befriending animals is important in the modern world, but it was crucial in the ancient one. Most horses and bovines would smile at the debate about which is more productive, men or women.
Then there's soil. I've actually seen farmers scoop a handful of soil up, mash it around in their fingers, sift it in the wind, and sniff it deeply. Sort of like how top officers were depicted as they arrived at Gettysburg. This was probably key during the transition from HG to crops.
Then there's weather/seasons. At least, a huge communal effort (eg. most henges). At most, the dawn of science.
Re: Altman
The depth of greed and cynicism on the right is matched only by the naiveté on the left. I've grown weary at the unending wave of crayoned, facile appeals for "ethical AI". Enough finger wagging, time to nut-up and paint/invent an alternative future. I put out an open invitation last month for Altman to apply for a position in the A.I. corp I founded in 2000 (largely dormant since my stroke*). If he ever takes me up on it, and gets hired, he will get a transistor theory text book and a snoutful of computational psychohistory. That'll learn 'im :)
* I recently found the notebook I once used to re-learn how to write. Starting with grade 2 printing, up thru greek alphabet, finally to a cursive signature that would not be rejected. I moved on to various tables from memory, but it seems I've lost that notebook somewhere.
I can glimpse the meaning of the Menorah, if that's ok for a gentile to say.
scidata, speaking of the naïve left...
There is an interesting series in this month's issue of the Atlantic about what would happen if Trump wins.
Of especially importance is an essay by Mark Leibovich entitled:
THIS IS WHO WE ARE
If Trump wins again, perhaps we can all finally abandon the delusion that his supporters do not represent the true America.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-2024-win-american-identity/676143/
Simply put, if Trump wins we have to accept and embrace the obvious fact the we Americans really are a bad/stupid people and abandon all the other naïve contrary views of our national character as being basically good and decent.
Lincoln would be proven wrong if Trump gets re-elected - it would show that we Americans have no "better angels of our nature".
By 2020 America had no illusion about what kind of man Trump was.
And he still received 74 million votes.
Only a bad/stupid country full of bad/stupid people would look at Trump, know everything about him and still say "we want more of that".
So maybe we should stop the blaming Biden's age if Trump gets re-elected.
He's not the one who would be putting Trump back in the White House.
The blame would lay exclusively on the bad/stupid people people who voted for him.
DP
Nice to know that I'm bad/stupid.
Under Trump the borders were secure, Putin and Xi Jinping weren't adventurous. Actually, Trump had removed enough regulations from the oil and gas industry that we became the world's #1 producer of oil, driving down the worldwide price of oil so far that Putin couldn't be adventurous. He actually did succeed in cutting regulations https://cei.org/blog/trump-regulations-federal-register-page-count-is-lowest-in-quarter-century/ .
Trump did not handle the COVID 19 nonsense well, like DeSantis did. But, all in all I'll take him over Slo' Joe any day of the week.
One of the reasons the Florida response was so successful is that DeSantis team figured it out early:
"The DeSantis team also didn’t put much stock in dire projections. “We kind of lost confidence very early on in models,” a Florida health official says. “We look at them closely, but how can you rely on something when it says you’re peaking in a week and then the next day you’ve already peaked?” Instead, “we started really focusing on just what we saw.” [ https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-crisis-ron-desantis-florida-covid-19-strategy/ ]"
Yep, they believed the data, not the useless models
DP:
The blame would lay exclusively on the bad/stupid people people who voted for him.
Agreed in sentiment, but with a few caveats about "exclusively".
Trump never won the popular vote. He won in 2016 not only because of his own voters, but because of those who most strongly dislike him, but for their own reasons refuse to vote for the candidate who would beat him. That's also how we lost congress and many states in 2010. It's not that Americans are deplorable, but the deplorables are the ones who go out and vote while too many others don't bother.
I do agree though that way too many of my fellow Americans are proudly deplorable. That depressed me after the 2016 election more than the actual outcome did.
mcsandberg:
Nice to know that I'm bad/stupid.
Nope, not taking the bait.
Larry Hart
Slo' Joe is determined to make everybody mad at him. I just had these http://theviews.org/Construction/2020/january-16-202-upper-level-framing-started.html filled with 1,600 gallons of propane yesterday and the price of delivered propane is now down to $1.89/gallon. The greens are now upset by how many LNG liquefaction lines and LNG terminals this administration has permitted.
There are so many running now that propane prices in the states have crashed. Why? Because to liquify natural gas, which is almost all methane you have to get rid of the propane because it will freeze before the methane liquifies. It's pretty much a waste product as far as they're concerned.
DP:
Simply put, if Trump wins we have to accept and embrace the obvious fact the we Americans really are a bad/stupid people and abandon all the other naïve contrary views of our national character as being basically good and decent.
I'd say it's a case of there being (at least) two Americas, nearly equal in proportion and with very different "national characters".
We're in a similar situation that Israel is, perceiving itself as both a democracy and a Jewish state and dealing with the fact that it has to choose between the two because there's a Heisenberg uncertainty principle which prevents it from being both simultaneously.
Likewise, America is both a democracy and a nation devoted to justice, equality, and human dignity, and we're finding we have to choose between the two.
There are still Americans with the characteristics Lincoln alluded to. The problem is that, more and more, we lack the reins of power or the will to use that power when we do manage to have it. And we can't (or don't) cower the populace or the politicians into bending or breaking the rules for us by threatening their lives and families the way that comes so easily to Deplorable America.
Always rack, yet not always ruin.
Reason for writing that we are both alike is how we build things up in our minds. Feminists aren’t as strident as they used to be; at the lectures decades ago, the semi-retired lady professors wanted to grab the attention of the audience. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, thus they would raise their voices and say, “the fetus is a tumor!”, rather than droning on regarding consciousness raising. Such was a fad way back then.
—
It is conceivable man will some day cheat death, that is to say, perhaps a few people...maybe more. Appears you conflate conceivable with plausible. It’s conceivable posthumans and bots will prepare Mars, and when preparations are completed, transhumans will arrive. (Likely not standard-issue homo sapiens.)
But I do not consider such scenarios plausible, merely conceivable. It gets into ‘dream the impossible dream’, I met RFK when I was very young and the impression was of just that.
—
You don’t really think absolute equality is what they are on about here, do you? I visualize a bell-curve: a minority in the future will be very poor; a minority will be v. wealthy. The majority will experience varying degrees of upward and downward mobility.
A minority will be contented; a minority will be malcontents.
The majority will waver.
—
It is a mystery how you’d think *absolute* equality is involved in CB thinking. Only hardline Commies and naifs today subscribe to absolutist equality. You are building-up flattening-somewhat in your mind—into something more that we are postulating.
Larry - "America is both a democracy and a nation devoted to justice, equality, and human dignity"
I think you will find that the MAGA folks are opposed to all of these.
locum… FILTER YOUR WATER!: “Such as half of us thinking we aren't going to die? As in this essay about how man will eventually cheat death?”
He then cites my essay on the topic, : https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/immortality.html ...
… which says repeatedly the diametric opposite to what he claims that it says. Yawn small surprise. Strawman, Dorothy is calling from California, where you left your brain.
-----
MCS… you’re kidding, right? “Under Trump the borders were secure, Putin and Xi Jinping weren't adventurous.”
What stunning delusions! As for foreign foes, they had NO NEED to be openly aggressive while their asset was in the White House! Time was on their side! It is no accident that panic began fizzing over there, esp. Moscow, within weeks after Biden came in and – I assert from circ. evidence – JoeB took the choke chains off of our protector caste, allowing them to retaliate against four years of unanswered KGB depredations.
Seriously, MCS? Putin’s hurried and clumsy attack on Ukraine, just before the autumn rasputitsa, happened as Javelins at last started flowing to Kyiv. And in the months since, we have seen that US/NATO officers have been competent while the forces of the East – long protected by Trump – are not.
"Actually, Trump had removed enough regulations from the oil and gas industry that we became the world's #1 producer of oil, driving down the worldwide price of oil so far that Putin couldn't be adventurous.”
Except you need to replace “Trump” with “Obama.” It was under Obama that the US became energy independent. As-is, there are no even glimmers of fact to that statement.
Um… your propane riff was simultaneously interesting and… whaaaaa? Methane is by far the cleanest carbon fuel and the transition to get us off dirtier stuff. And exporting LNG makes us powerful and weakens OPEN and strengthens EU resolve.
You are likely also down on Biden folks’ efforts to (finally!) hunt down the monsters who are deliberately or lazily venting methane into the air.
-------
LH: “Trump never won the popular vote. He won in 2016 not only because of his own voters, but because of those who most strongly dislike him, but for their own reasons refuse to vote for the candidate who would beat him.
The frippy preening lefty splitters need to be HAMMERED! “If you go flouncing off to some Nader-Stein distraction, you had better live in NY, CA, IL or MA. Otherwise, I will personally denounce you as a traitor to everything you claim to believe.” See http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2019/08/five-devastating-rebuttals-to-use-with.html
AB: “ “the fetus is a tumor!”, Ooog that is a new one to me. Eeep!
Dr Brin:
As for foreign foes, they had NO NEED to be openly aggressive while their asset was in the White House! Time was on their side! It is no accident that panic began fizzing over there, esp. Moscow, within weeks after Biden came in a
To those like mcs and jim who see the good side of Trump, this proves their point. "When we oppose Putin, we have war. When we appease Putin, we have peace. Therefore, appeasement is better."
But mcsandberg is firmly in the right-wing bubble, and he accepts as true all of their alternative facts. That's why there's no point in repudiating them individually. Even the third party listeners at whom the argument would be aimed already know, unless they are also inside the right-wing bubble.
Dr Brin:
If you go flouncing off to some Nader-Stein distraction,...
The way recent elections have been much more about who to vote against than about who to vote for, maybe we should actually count votes in the negative. That is, in 2016, Hillary's "negative vote" would be the total of all Trump/Stein/Johnson/Other votes cast. Trump's "negative vote" would be the Hillary/Stein/Johnson/Other totals. Stein's, the Hillary/Trump/Johnson/Other total. Etc. Then whoever's negative vote is lowest wins.
America is neither a democracy nor a nation devoted to justice, equality or human dignity. Instead, it is a cognitively dissonant borderline schizophrenic suffering from dementia induced by cultural relativism:
To whit:
(1) Our progressive left denies the reality of demographic replacement, but insists that it's a good & socially beneficial development;
(2) Our universities intellectualize calls for genocide as 'protected speech' while condemning pronoun 'misgendering' as criminally prohibited hate speech;
(3) We justify violence in the pursuit of 'social justice' but we consider it's self-defensive use as immoral & unjustifiable vigilantism; and
(4) We excuse the criminally irresponsible (because irresponsible people, by definition, are NOT responsible) while we throw the book at those responsible individuals 'who should know better'.
This disease state also affects Europe in a big way, as its ultracivilised leaders celebrate the demographic replacement of its own citizens by muslim invaders, intellectualize cultural cowardice as a 'moral good', imprison those native 'extremists' who declare that their own lives also matter & provide extra-special-super-duper protections to those irresponsible individuals who can & will never be held responsible by our own treasonous authorities.
This cannot continue as reality will not be denied.
Best
Dr. Brin
I think most of us are thinking about when we finally achieved energy independence:
“ By the time President Trump took office in 2017, U.S. net energy imports had fallen 75% from the 2005 level. In 2019, net energy imports turned negative, meaning the U.S. had become energy independent. So, while it is technically correct to say that the U.S. became energy independent while President Trump was in office, the reason was the shale boom that had begun in earnest in 2005.” ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2023/05/02/us-energy-independence-soars-to-highest-levels-in-over-70-years/?sh=461a4363977f )
I was surprised at how cheap propane has gotten that I looked into it a bit and was really surprised at just how much LNG were making and shipping overseas.
As for my experience with this… it's about zero in the personal sense, but my first girlfriend grew up on a farm. I learned a bit from her and her father. I've lived in rural places and near enough to farms to see things, but that doesn't really count anymore
So, you basically have zero experience. I suspect I'm much older than u, and my grandparent's farm was a very small family farm where physical labor for jobs like haying was much more of a thing.
However, u have zero clue about just how big the phydifference is between men and women who develop their physical attributes. Yes, sedentary men who don't work out won't have a huge labor advantage, but guys who do physical labor all of the time will gain the ability for far more labor output.
I know this to be true from my years doing competitive Judo at an elite club (produced 59 national champions in Judo and Sombo Wrestling).
At my peak, I was a mediocre male competitor who is very small. When I graduated from high school, I was 5'7" 125. Well, a little more than two years later after living in the gym at college following two knee surgeries, I was 175 and not at all fat. My frame was just as small, but I had added 50lbs. My bench press went from 240 to 355.
Women can't gain muscle mass like that unless they take roids.
Oh, and after basically not training in Judo for two years, I could dominate a women's national champion in our dojo simply bc I now had a massive strength advantage. Of course, going from 16 lbs lighter to 34 lbs heavier probably helped.
What do you mean endurance advantage? About the ONLY endurance sport women might be able to defeat men is in super long distance swimming where women's higher body fat percentage allows them to float due to better buoyancy. Male marathon runners easily outpace their female counterparts.
Male farm laborers will get MUCH stronger than women laborers when they have to do physical labor every day. Plus, muscular endurance favors men by a huge margin.
Scidata, if you want to talk about farm labor animals, the big job is plowing. And, man oh man, males will have a MASSIVE advantage with a horse-drawn plowing.
Ever see an old plow before? You have to RAM the plow into the earth by pulling the handles up. The plow tends to raise as the horse pulls it forward, so the human has to keep that plow biting deep---and that takes significant upper body strength---which is precisely what women lack.
As for the deployability, I was talking about training injuries and pregnancy. On a regular basis, women will be on sick call 3x more often than men.
I believe women do have higher pain tolerance than men---i think that's a biological necessity driven by the ability to give birth.
mcsandberg:
Just on the borders - the FACT that the dems increased the funding for the border patrol and they then caught twice as many people does NOT mean that more people illegally crossed the border
What it does mean is that you went from stopping 40% of crossers to stopping 70%
JV
ploughing is a very recent thing - your "old plough" is only a few hundred years old - there were ploughs that did not go as deep and could not be used on heavy soil but even those are only a couple of thousand years old
Locumbranch
I'm a Brit - we are the result of wave after wave of "immigrants" - and todays Muslims are only a very small percentage of the population and are NOT going to become a large percentage for the simple reason that when people become better off they stop breeding
Iran has a children to women ratio of 1.7 - which is lower than France
duncan cairncross
Good grief, everyone knows that the southern border is wide open:
"President Joe Biden's no-border policy has detonated an explosion of illegal-alien apprehensions and got-aways at the southern "frontier." Millions of Americans consider this one of Biden's biggest failures, surpassed only by his utterly calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. However, this fiasco is Biden's finest hour.
After 11 months, Biden's "border" remains wide open, if not functionally erased. Illegal aliens cascade across. Between February 1 and December 31, 2021 -- on Biden's watch -- Customs and Border Protection (CPB) apprehended a record 1,956,596 illegals on the southern "frontier" versus 511,192 one year earlier, during President Donald J. Trump’s tenure – up 283 percent.
Biden gives illegals free tickets to ride buses that whisk them deep into the U.S. interior. Illegal aliens in Brownsville, Texas score free cab rides to the airport, whereupon they jet to Atlanta, Houston, and other cities.
Still other illegals -- including single adult males -- board clandestine night flights that land after closing time in New York's Westchester Airport and other airfields. As if in a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, illegal aliens without papers may use their arrest warrants as ID to board aircraft. Specifically, this is ICE Form I-200 -- Warrant for Arrest of Alien. [https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/bidens-wide-open-border-is-deliberate ]"
This administration cut border funding in 2022:
" The $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill President Joe Biden signed this week — the first since he took office — has the biggest hike in domestic spending in four years. But not all programs are equal. Climate-change boondoggles get billions while border-security funding is slashed by nearly a half-billion — even as illegal crossings continue to spike.
It’s a recipe for disaster as officials expect an overwhelming flood of migrants within weeks as Biden prepares to lift the COVID-deportation measure. [ https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/biden-cuts-border-funding-as-his-policies-are-about-to-overwhelm-it/ ]"
mcsandberg:
After 11 months, Biden's "border" remains wide open, if not functionally erased. Illegal aliens cascade across.
I assume you're conflating refugees with illegals. Because they're not the same thing, but right-wing world treats them as if they are.
Between February 1 and December 31, 2021 -- on Biden's watch -- Customs and Border Protection (CPB) apprehended a record 1,956,596 illegals on the southern "frontier" versus 511,192 one year earlier, during President Donald J. Trump’s tenure – up 283 percent.
Are you even listening to yourself? Biden apprehended more illegals than Trump managed to. That's a bad thing?
Biden gives illegals free tickets to ride buses that whisk them deep into the U.S. interior. Illegal aliens in Brownsville, Texas score free cab rides to the airport, whereupon they jet to Atlanta, Houston, and other cities.
I live in Chicago. On my planet, the migrants who arrive daily in busses from Texas aren't being sent by President Biden. Caveat emptor, I realize that things might be different in the alternate universe that you come from.
Jesus H Christ! "Authoritative" remarks by Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, and Ayn Rand aren't enough? The New York Post now?
Rendereth unto me an effing break.
Larry Hart
Refugees are required to seek asylum in the first country they enter into. If they don't they are illegal aliens.
The Biden administrations policy is catch and release, not catch and deport. Trump's policy was stay in Mexico and catch and deport those who didn't. Therefore, those apprehensions are meaningless, since they're allowed to stay in country.
How about MSN?
"The Biden administration has unleashed a new program to boost illegal immigration that allows immigrants to fly directly from their hometowns into a U.S. city of their choice, according to newly obtained records.
Instead of rushing the Texas border, the program lets immigrants use the administration’s app to pick a destination, buy an airline ticket, and fly in unseen on what amounts to ghost flights." [ https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/biden-s-dhs-let-200000-illegal-immigrants-fly-directly-into-43-cities/ar-AA1h3gIv ]"
Larry Hart
Those apprehensions aren't completely meaningless, they do give us some indication of just how many illegals are entering the country.
While today's border is a confusing mess:
1- JoeB oughta go after the refugee sources. NOT Mexico! Whch thanks to US policy and our re-induistrialization (caused by dems) is fast heading into a middle class society, though with 1960s level problems.
But re Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela...2 rightwing & 2 leftwing tyrannies... JB should say"By waging war on your own people, you wage war on us. Your elites have a year to negotiate ways to fix this."
---
MCS: That 75% reduction had Momentum and hence, it was effectively energy independence. We no longer had to fret about boycotts or coercion. Before Trump.
Dr. Brin
"That 75% reduction had Momentum and hence, it was effectively energy independence. "
Exactly! But no one remembers that. All that is remembered is the actual date of energy independence happened under Trump.
Duncan,
re: plows, I think you're correct. My medieval history readings did state that heavy forged-iron plowshares are very new, as the price of iron needed to drop way down for even a whole village of peasants to afford one. Before that - scratch plows, digging sticks, hardwood mattocks and the like.
Likewise, the huge scythe that DEATH carries is also a new invention enabled by cheap iron. Look at bronze age sickles - one-handed, not much metal, not as much force needed, just near-constant whetting and expert technique.
Plus, a huge chunk of the world relies on wet-rice agriculture, which is mostly endless stoop labor. Massive muscles not needed, but endurance/efficiency are key. And contrary to JV's statements, some old farmhands I've talked to envied the stamina of the women they worked with. (There's also the old anecdote of the 6-foot, strapping Western infantryman stopping to help a little old Asian lady move her carefully balanced load, and not even being able to lift it...)
Pappenheimer
P.S. - I have an old wargame showing the history of England starting with the Roman invasions and progressing through the centuries, with the the invader of the century pushing the previous batch into...well, Wales and Scotland, usually.
Sure, we’re going through dislocation unpleasant enough for any taste.
You didn’t bring this up: but as an example will mention the George Floyd rioters: many were merely along for the frisson of mayhem—but many were also genuinely nervous concerning the prospect of Trump’s re-election a half year later.
Universities calling for genocide? Specifically genocide in the Levant? Do you feel threatened by faculty and staff? I do not at all. In fact, a common charge is that universities are full of wusses.
However in the South, I met quite a few who were moderately threatening, who thought the 700K (a substantial number in a four-year war) killed during the Civil War was some sort of burnt offering to their deity. Because Lee looked so fine on his horse, and said kindly things makes him any less destructive? He kept the war going for how many yrs?
—
Why is a Palestinian flag necessarily mote sinister than a Confederate flag?
While it's technically correct that the Biden Administration has *virtually* eliminated 'Illegal Immigration', it has only done so by changing its terminology to magically transform those illegal immigrants into 'undocumented refugees'.
The same is true of California Governor Gavin Newsom who has technically eliminated 'junkies', 'addicts' and 'the homelessness' by rebranding them as 'people with drug dependency' and 'the unhoused'.
R.A. Lafferty described this dishonest methodology as changing the Name of the Snake while keeping its venom, yet this approach is no more dishonest than equating everything else to something that it is not, like claiming that Israelis are Nazis, Palestinians are Confederates and Trump is Hitler.
This garbage is thoughtless thinking & stupidity personified.
Best
But re Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela...2 rightwing & 2 leftwing tyrannies... JB should say"By waging war on your own people, you wage war on us. Your elites have a year to negotiate ways to fix this."
Dr. Brin, for this to work, there needs to be a credible "or else." If they don't take action, what does Biden threaten? Cutting off aid? Sanctions? Invasion?
John Viril:
There needs to be a credible "or else." If they don't take action, what does Biden threaten?
My cynical answer is, "If they don't fix this, Trump will be re-elected, and then they'll be sorry."
(There's also the old anecdote of the 6-foot, strapping Western infantryman stopping to help a little old Asian lady move her carefully balanced load, and not even being able to lift it...)
Pappenheimer,
You can take 10 Asian little old ladies and I'll take 10 strapping young 6" infantry soldiers. Over a year of moving stuff, my 10 will crush your 10 in volume of goods delivered.
Sure, someone experienced and conditioned for a task will perform it surprisingly well vs. a novice (even one who appears much more capable).But, that won't hold up over the long term.
Push our laborers hard, and your women will break down with far more injuries.
Your point about rice farming is sound, but this Asian farms would still involve many physical labor tasks. Till land with lower tech tools than a heavy plow just means physical strength means even more. Use stone age tools, and men are going to be even more productive relative to women.
Biden apprehended more illegals than Trump managed to. That's a bad thing?
Larry,
It is when it's obvious that the overall volume of undocumented immigrants has quadrupled.
The DNC's "look the other way" policy is a bald-faced attempt to import voters. It very much cuts into the DNC's credibility about "protecting democracy." I suspect the partisan positions on undocumented immigrants would flip overnight if the demographic entering through Mexico started voting RNC.
Both the DNC and oligarch elites benefit from masses of low-skill labor imports. I think it's a big reason why Biden's economic gains (so far) are a highly polarized range. (big gains among the affluent class, bad for the lower classes.)
Characterizing such objections as "Nazi replacement theory" is a cheap partisan ad hominem designed to silence conversation instead of engaging in a good-faith attempt at solving a political problem.
"undocumented immigrants" cannot vote.
If they become documented immigrants, and then citizens, then that IS democracy. It is also, in fact what much of the American myth is all about.
TFG committed a truth when he said he wouldn't mind immigration from Norway and Sweden. Would you be so bothered if hordes of Anni-Frids, Bjorns, Bennes and Agnithas were sneaking over the Canadian border?
"...race, color, or previous condition of servitude...." shouldn't enter into it. (15th amendment).
Dr. Brin,
Have to take - well, I wish I could actually take an aquatical, but a sabbatical will have to do. Promised myself I'd write something I could submit to an actual SF magazine - my Sojourns duo isn't selling on Kindle. (1) I don't promote it, (2) too much semi-pro competition and (3) I need to stretch myself to get better before continuing with stories 3 and 4.
Also, the Loc-type weirdos are starting to outnumber the fun-type weirdos. An artifact of the upcoming election? Tida' tahu.
Pappenheimer
It is when it's obvious that the overall volume of undocumented immigrants has quadrupled
The GOP shouting about it has gone up considerably!!
But that is what happens every election cycle - when the GOP is in charge they shut up about immigrants
When the Dems are in charge suddenly its a problem
Just like the Deficit !
And just like the deficit the GOP do things to make it worse - historically they CUT the budget for the border
There is NO EVIDENCE at all that the number of undocumented immigrants has gone up
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/16/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/
It MAY have increased by a few percent - but probably NOT and certainly not "Quadrupled"
Trump is an Aaron Burr/Jefferson Davis, not Hitler.
John,
So, you basically have zero experience. I suspect I'm much older than u, and ...
Well… at best I'd claim indirect experience, but I have tried very hard to avoid jobs requiring hard physical labor. I'll freely admit that.
As for age I was born in '62. I don't imagine you are all THAT much older than I am. Lots of us here are roughly in the same ballpark give or take a decade.
———
However, u have zero clue about just how big the phydifference is between men and women who develop...
Nonsense. I was a competition swimmer when I was young. I remember VERY well being a boy of 12 looking up at boys who were 17 and understanding why I couldn't beat them. Puberty matters. Adult hormones are needed to put on muscle mass. I was as good as I could be in terms of skills and stamina, but I had some growing up to do for the rest of it.
Competition swimming taught me another thing. I got pretty good at doing the butterfly for distance. My team would insert me in medley races because I wouldn't lose too much time on my leg and the other boys were much better at the other strokes. What I noticed was boys past puberty looked different if they did the fly a lot. Butterfly specialists looked like little fireplugs with massive upper body and a big ass. The other guys came out looking leaner, but breaststroke swimmers were kinda in between. It is obvious why. What we typically do impacts on our toned shape. NONE of us looked like wrestlers because we were swimmers.
Girls couldn't muscle up the same way. They HAD muscles, but it wasn't obvious and wasn't as much. That too was easy to understand.
———
Remember we were talking about farming in the early days of agriculture. We both should be careful about applying modern experiences to past environments. So… let's go down a list and check assumptions about PRESENT and PAST conditions.
1. Men have the hormones necessary to provide a physical strength advantage over women. Sure. I think this one is a good assumption. Slamming a plow back into the ground takes upper body strength. Even in my early 60's and 80 lbs overweight, I can do jerks and slams that make my wife's eyebrows pop. Hormones of all types probably haven't changed much over a few millenia.
2. Men doing work that requires physical labor (like farming) will build mass and tone in a way that suits the work they do. Sure. Fair assumption. Likely applies evenly across time because there hasn't been enough time for evolution to change us much.
3. Men doing work that requires physical labor will build mass and tone. OOPS. No. This is poor assumption because building body mass like a modern wrestler is NOT done on a standard diet let alone the likely diet available to early farmers. Even as a swimmer while I was incapable of building large muscles, I chowed through enormous numbers of calories. Little showed up as muscle, but they DID show up in stamina. At my peak I could swim all damn day at a workout pace IF I ate and drank as needed.
Remember we were talking about early farmers and the issues associated with losing large numbers of men from the field. IF there was a lot of violence going on, there would be fewer guys around to slam the plow back into the ground, right? Now… go look again at wetland rice cultivation. Where is the plow? It's in the picture once humans domesticated critters like a water buffalo, but the terracing was more likely about dragging logs around to even the wet ground. Guys would have an advantage there too, but NOT IF their diet was piss poor… which I think it was until the non-shattering rice variants hit the scene.
—————
Stamina is mostly about duration events and not races. Finishing is the point. Can you process enough O2 to accomplish a feat that takes lots of time. You don't need huge muscles unless the feat requires great strength. You need a strong heart and the ability to clean the blood quickly of metabolites.
CP said...
(In response to David...)
When I was writing, I was thinking about how art and other aspects of culture would translate between species with substantially different sensory systems. For example, if representatives of trichromatic and tetrachromatic species each painted the same landscape, then exchanged canvases, would they perceive the other's product as intrinsically beautiful, let along meaningful?
As David pointed out, the answer is "maybe", and probably at least some would do so. Recall that some people hated Van Gogh and the Impressionists, while others loved them. The same is true about every "different" bit of art and culture.
It's another version of 'curiosity'. Some people are interested in and enjoy things that are new and different.
It is possible that products of another species would be "incomprehensible", but that is an empirical question, not something that can be asserted a priori.
Curiosity drives exploration. I'm not suggesting that it be suppressed. In fact, I would be very disappointed if it was. Economic, resource and cultural pressures drive colonization. That's a different thing, entirely. The first can occur without the latter.
Curiosity drives exploration, and also migration. I am a migrant. When I first relocated it was just to see what it would be like, and I ended as an immigrant. Some migration is due to economics and resources; some is not.
Even if one is just considering tourism, that will end up with some kind of "colonization", as that tourism needs to be supported by people at the destination.
What I'm suggesting is that we will need to make a transition from an expansionist to a post-expansionist culture in order to solve the environmental, social and economic problems that we currently face. And, that the barriers to successfully doing "big things in space" are sufficiently high that they probably won't be a significant factor in doing so (nor, will they provide a viable "escape hatch" if we fail). If we succeed in making the transition to a stable post expansionist culture, the pressure to colonize will largely be eliminated. Hence, I suspect that we will simply choose not to do so. Exploration will, hopefully, continue unabated.
Can you define 'expansionist'? "Expansion" of what, exactly? After all, even "exploration" is a form of 'expansion', as is research and technological development.
Indeed, I would argue that it is only research and development that can "solve the environmental, social and economic problems that we currently face".
And I would suggest that the idea that "we will simply choose not to" expand into the solar system is profoundly mistaken, assuming that we are able to and that people still want to go out and explore and see new things and live in new ways. The only things that I can see standing in the way are a lack of resources or some fundamental change in humans - something that would be, basically, and end to curiosity and discovery.
Of course,space exploration (even colonization) is unlikely to save us if we wreck the Earth (at least in the next one hundred years - beyond that it is hard to say), but that seems to me a completely different issue.
John Viril:
Both the DNC and oligarch elites benefit from masses of low-skill labor imports.
Yes, so despite the rhetoric and theater, Republicans in power never actually eliminate illegal immigration.
locumranch
A hearty Thanx! for noting the terminology change.
All
Maybe a Democrat governor asking for help will convince you that the border crisis is real? https://townhall.Com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2023/12/08/arizonas-dem-governor-begs-biden-for-help-as-illegal-immigrants-overrun-her-state-n2632200 .
Yes, I'm using Townhall for a source. All the supporting documents are linked to in the article.
undocumented immigrants" cannot vote.
It's a long term strategy. Illegals will have children who will b birthright citizens.
This effect is a huge reason why places like Texas, arizona, and New Mexico are turning purple after being solid red for 30 years.
Some do manage to become documented. The legal dodge of claiming refugee status is the latest tactic from undocumented immigrants, whose primary motivation is to send money home.
I totally understand this incentive. As a half-filipino, I can't help but note that the Philippines has about the same population as Mexico and 1/3 the GDP. I watched my father transform lives by sending money home which had about a 7 to 1 buying power.
There are DNC strategists who crow that DNC dominance is a demographic inevitability. Just how do you think that happened?
Larry Hart, bear in mind that the (Formerly) GOP is rapidly changing as it continues to purge those insufficiently committed to "Orange Jesus". The party, as it was, seemed unlikely to ever overturn Roe V Wade, yet they have. Cutting off immigration would be damaging, in the short and long term, but the parties ears are closed to those who know this, "Drumph!" only cares that his will, whatever that may be, is done.
deleted and reposted because of faulty attribution.
* * *
mcsandberg:
Maybe a Democrat governor asking for help will convince you that the border crisis is real?
Oh, I don't deny that it's real. I just don't prioritize it as high as some other pressing issues, such as authoritarian fascism, especially since (despite their theater), Republicans are no better at controlling the border than Democrats.
There's a difference between "I wish Biden would handle the border better," and "I can't support Biden against Trump."
* * *
John Viril:
Illegals will have children who will b birthright citizens.
This effect is a huge reason why places like Texas, arizona, and New Mexico are turning purple after being solid red for 30 years.
I've been hearing a lot of gloom-and-doom for Democrats that disagree with your assessment. For instance, that Texas Latinos tend to skew conservative and religious, and have left the Democratic Party.
I'd also expect that one reason the southwest is turning purple is that more and more retirees from the northeast and Midwest are moving there.
Finally, I can't speak for the other states, but my in-laws live in Texas. I'm aware that the Texas delegation to Congress was more Democratic than Republican until Tom DeLay convinced the state legislature to re-district between the normal census years (in 2003) and gerrymander the heck out of Austin, Dallas, and Houston.
There are DNC strategists who crow that DNC dominance is a demographic inevitability.
Again, I hope so. All I'm hearing from James Carville and the like are that the Democrats are toast.
Not exactly.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48WGSBcaxmY
The unemployment rate dropped to 3.7 percent in the best economy in 40 years. Inflation plummeting after supply chain issues got solved. US manufacturing is in booming revival after the Pelosi bills succeeded where 33 years of 'supply side' voodoo failed. Deficit ratios are declining (as always, under dems) instead of skyrocketing (as always under goppers). Science is restored and the FBI is back on the job and the IRS will at last be able to go after the cheaters. (That last item terrifies owners of the GOP) Health costs stopped double digit rising...
And we are finally doing things (partially) to save the planet. Yet the oligarchs have their shills chanting "America has become hell!" (What? So soon after you Made America Great?) Well, given that violence and every turpitude are worse in red-run states (except Utah) than blue ones (except Illinois) - BET $$$ over that! - I can see why MAGAs think they are in hell.
Meanwhile, on Russian television, Vladimir Putin thanked U.S. Republicans for blocking additional aid to Ukraine. And he and Venezuela etc. are deliberately herding poor refugees to make border crises in the West.
So why are Biden's polls down? Simple (and no pundit says it). Our Union-blue side in this 8th phase of the US Civil War is larger... but it contains a wing of frippy preener sanctimony junkies who deem it uncool to ever express loyalty or support to anyone 'establishment', certainly not to a pollster!
There is only one coalition that can save the planet and our kids and our nation... and the 2021-22 bills show that dems are sincere, impressing even Bernie, Liz & AOC. If the preeners betray us again, as with Nader/Stein etc., we must let them know who we will blame, next time.
JV I am in favor of getting over our guilt over central American crimes of the 1920s. The elites of those countries should get an “or else’ that PERSONALLY they will be deemed ‘at war’ against the US.
------
Re Asian rice stoop labor… recall the happy final scene of the Seven Samurai?
----
Still..there's this absurdity -- “about "protecting democracy." I suspect the partisan positions on undocumented immigrants would flip overnight if the demographic entering through Mexico started voting RNC.”
Utter crap!
Until Trump, it was ALWAYS true that dems supported LEGAL immigration, which can lead to voters and ALWAYS beefed up the Border Patrol… which the GOP ALWAYS eviscerated in order to get cheap labor who could never complain OR vote. That’s the way it ALWAYS was, till MAGA changed it all for confusion and when enemies realized they could mess up western liberalism by flooding the West with refugees. (PLEASE, OH PLEASE BET ME $$$ ON THAT.)
-----
Pappenheimer we’ll miss you. If writing in YA, have a look at my soon-to-be republished “Out of Time” (or “Yanked!”) series: Only teens can teleport through time and space! Dollops of fun, adventure & optimism for young adults. http://www.davidbrin.com/outoftime.html
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“It's a long term strategy. Illegals will have children who will b birthright citizens.”
OMG modern politicians (except a few dems) having a ‘long term strategy?” Of 20 years??? What planet are you from?
====
Skimmed locum’s latest. Are you back in California, sir? Or filtering your water?
Your assertions, while right-wing – are not strawman nonsense this time.
They make a valid… if just 10% - minor polemical point.
A month in politics is a long time, ten months is an eternity; no one here ought to hoist the white flag before the battle has begun.
Dr Brin:
So why are Biden's polls down? Simple (and no pundit says it). Our Union-blue side in this 8th phase of the US Civil War is larger... but it contains a wing of frippy preener sanctimony junkies...
That's part of it. It also helps the Republicans that they control more state legislatures and secretaries of state. And they've locked up the supreme court and much of the federal judiciary. And the news media purposely reports in such a way as to keep us all on the edge of our seats, because a nail-biter brings in more readers/viewers. And a majority of the country gets its "news" from FOX, and so lives in an alternate reality until actual reality runs into them on a battlefield.
...who deem it uncool to ever express loyalty or support to anyone 'establishment', certainly not to a pollster!
If Biden's polls are down because people are lying to them, that's not such a bad thing. It won't be reflected in actual voting totals (remember the inevitable Red Wave?). We just have to not let polling discourage us, especially if it is known to be inaccurate.
Also, remember that now when people tell pollsters they won't vote for Biden, they mean they'd rather vote for Gavin Newsom or RFK Jr or Bernie Sanders--some other liberal. When election day rolls around and the choice is Biden or Trump, with all that the latter entails, they may feel differently. It certainly happened on the other side in 2016. As the campaign wore on, dozens of prominent Republicans who had said they couldn't countenance Trump realized that ithey couldn't countenance Hillary even more.
If the preeners betray us again, as with Nader/Stein etc., we must let them know who we will blame, next time.
I've been blaming them for years. Not that they care what I think.
Both interesting and utter nonsense.
https://www.sciencealert.com/its-time-scientists-urge-the-world-to-declare-a-new-epoch-on-the-moon
To John V - as an actual farm kid growing up on a farm in the '60's, I can tell you that YOU DON'T KNOW ANY DAMN THING ABOUT FARMING, modern or ancient. Have you ever helped a vet pull a stillborn calf, or milked cows (by hand and hooking up a machine), ever gathered eggs from the chicken coop 7/52, or sat on a tractor for hours and hours, picked and shucked sweet corn, or any of the other dozens of chores that are required to keep a farm running, but don't require upper body strength.
Please explain to the group the thousands of years of farming in North and South America that did not conform to your narrow-minded vision of farming, then go tell the pre-Columbian mound builders in Cahokia, or the Inca, or the Maya, or the Mandan, etc. that they were doing it all wrong.
JR
There are many farm skills that have nothing to do with upper body strength, unless that includes the brain. Here's one. Bulls are f'ing dangerous. There were times when we needed to get the herd into the barn but bull(s) were against the idea. We'd get a kid (sometimes me) to go into the barn and try hard to make the bleating sound of a calf in distress. The cows would quickly head barnward. The bull(s) would follow. Presto. (worked for sheep/rams too).
JV
I bow to your experience on a MODERN farm
The discussion was however about farming ten thousand years ago - which was entirely different
99% of the "chores" that emphasize upper body strength simply did not exist - and the tools were simpler
With a modern spade you need strength - with a digging stick you need patience and endurance
Large animals had not been domesticated
The initial "farming" was more like a hunter/gatherer doing gathering and with todays hunter/gatherers the bulk of the nourishment is collected by the women
Btw my reference to Confederate and Palestinian flags is only re the flags as symbols.
—
I do not feel threatened by students on campuses carrying Palestinian flags—what are students going to do? Slap someone in the face with their notebooks? Merely poseurs; they’ve got Commies outside universities with banners reading:
‘Smash Imperialism’;
‘Smash Racism’;
Smash Smash. Kill Kill.
And I wouldn’t go within 500 miles of Dixie.
Here's the pivotal question...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/opinion/bidenomics-progressive-economy.html
...
So here’s how I see it: The results of Biden’s victory in 2020 have fallen well short of progressives’ dreams, but a Biden defeat next year would be the stuff of progressive nightmares. Are left-leaning Americans able to hold both facts in their minds and act appropriately?
Gregory Byshenk:
> Can you define 'expansionist'? "Expansion" of what, exactly? After
> all, even "exploration" is a form of 'expansion', as is research and
> technological development.
>
> Indeed, I would argue that it is only research and development that
> can "solve the environmental, social and economic problems that we
> currently face".
>
> And I would suggest that the idea that "we will simply choose not to"
> expand into the solar system is profoundly mistaken, assuming that we
> are able to and that people still want to go out and explore and see
> new things and live in new ways. The only things that I can see
> standing in the way are a lack of resources or some fundamental
> change in humans - something that would be, basically, and end to
> curiosity and discovery.
>
> Of course,space exploration (even colonization) is unlikely to save
> us if we wreck the Earth (at least in the next one hundred years -
> beyond that it is hard to say), but that seems to me a completely
> different issue.
"Expansion," as used in my original comments, means a continuous increase in population/resource extraction/energy use. If we're going to solve our environmental and related problems on earth, we need to move away from that (at least as a driving force) while continuing to expand technology, knowledge, cultural richness, etc. To succeed, we need to stabilize the population, then start it on a downward glide while directing most of the improvements in knowledge/technology into raising the average quality of life, resolving social/political issues, dealing with the environmental problems we've already created, etc. And, we need to do it without blowing ourselves up. Large scale expansion into the solar system is unlikely to be anything more than a distraction, in that regard, over the next 100-200 years. If we succeed, I suspect that there will be little motivation for a large scale human presence in space, going forward (even while research/exploration/limited tourism/etc will proceed). And, due to cost, everything that can be automated with be automated with regard to those continuing efforts.
The analogy is Antarctica. We have a variety of research stations and limited tourism. And, we have the technology to build more extensive infrastructure. But, the cost would be high and few people would be willing to sign up to live there permanently. The barriers to large-scale human expansion in space are much higher...
I'm not ideologically opposed to colonization. I just don't think it's likely to "happen" in the foreseeable future. And, that the Fermi paradox may argue against it as a general pathway.
Thanks for sharing this idiots sanctimonious - 'holding my nose' bullshit.
>>So here’s how I see it: The results of Biden’s victory in 2020 have fallen well short of progressives’ dreams,
Nacy Pelosi should slap his face, with AOC, Bernie, Liz and all the others who make 2021-22 an ANNO MIRABILIS, standing in line to take their turns.
onward
onward
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